International workshop on Human Capital Development – building evidence on skills and employment

The European Training Foundation (ETF) organised an international workshop on skills and employment evidence in the overall context of human capital development policies. For more than one decade, the ETF has pursued the Torino Process as regular monitoring and progress assessment of policies related to vocational education and training in the lifelong learning context. Also, ETF provides support and enables exchanges for the European neighbouring countries to consolidate their evidence systems for active labour market, upskilling and reskilling policies.

Jointly with the Swedish Public Employment Service and Statistics Sweden, the ETF organised an international workshop, in Stockholm, focused on updates and exchanges concerning latest developments in the areas of education, skills and employment evidence, new data collection methods and priorities for evidence generation, interpretation and dissemination in the EU neighbouring countries.

The event gathered representatives of relevant institutions from 23 ETF Partner Countries (including 11 participants from the Eastern Partnership countries, 19 representatives of South-Eastern Europe and Türkiye region, 6 participants from Central Asia and 10 from the South-East Mediterranean region), also specialists from the EU Member States (Sweden, Poland), OECD, and Economics Data&Research.

Three major topics guided the meeting and mutual exchanges: (i) How to make sense of multiple sources of information and data and build up comprehensive data systems covering education, training and employment policy areas.(ii) Explore the impact of digitalisation on data creation, interpretation and policy use; and (iii) Critical areas for developing capacities in the EU neighbouring countries, and cooperation opportunities.

Participants heard about novelties in datasets generation on active labour market policies and employment services, types of data, collection methods, storage and policy usage. Participating countries, European and international organisations  also shared new angles of data research to inform policies and programmes aimed at supporting transition from joblessness to employment and up/re-skilling.

Participants also discussed challenges and successes with national collection of data on education and training in the context of international data cooperation, including those collected by the ETF. They also heard about forthcoming developments such as the next round of Torino Process monitoring and the new PISA for VET project of the OECD and had an opportunity to discuss and present their own plans for the future.

Field visits and focused discussions enabled hands-on exchanges and peer learning, as well as provided updates concerning latest developments at EU and international level.