Developing Skills in a Changing World of Work: Concepts, Measurement and Data Applied in Regional and Local Labour Market Monitoring Across Europe

The world of work is changing fundamentally and quickly as a result of technological transformation, demographic development and globalisation. The contributions in the anthology show for ten European countries that not only do the degree and speed vary significantly between occupations, sectors and firm types – the changes take on diverse forms in different geographical locations. Labour market actors at regional and local level need to know which skills, competences and know-how are required from the labour force so that they can set up their strategies in line with the future developments. Regional and local labour market observatories, which are established in over 550 regions and localities in Europe already, can provide significant support in these processes as they have far-reaching experiences with applying a wide variety of methods to collecting, analysing and combining data. Furthermore, they are embedded in regional/local networks of labour market actors and actively contribute to shaping regional strategy processes evidence-based labour market policies. The contributions demonstrate from different perspectives the approaches to skills and competence monitoring applied in various European regions and localities. In particular, the authors focus on the methods and sources of data and information, implemented instruments, resulting strategy-building and role of observatories in these processes. The compilation of approaches offers an overview of the state-of-the art in labour market monitoring, which can be used for building up skills and competence monitoring frameworks at regional and local level.