Participation in training of adult workers in European countries. Evidences from recent surveys

The importance of a highly skilled workforce has become increasingly relevant in the context of the European Union new strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth - ‘Europe 2020’. At the individual level, a good education is increasingly decisive for employment prospects and earnings levels. Hence, education and training systems must generate new skills, to respond to the nature of the new jobs which are expected to be created, as well as to improve the adaptability and employability of adults already in the labor force. The skills and competences of the workforce are the product of a large variety of learning activities that take place in diverse institutional contexts. While good initial education provides an essential foundation, learning continues through the working years. Policies encouraging wide participation in continuing training are therefore an important component of lifelong learning strategies. Very little is known concerning differences in continuing training or their causes and consequences. Such information would be useful for assessing policy choices related to training, such as whether to encourage an overall increase in training levels or to attempt to redirect training investments toward groups currently receiving little training. This publication deal with some of these issues. Chapter 1 surveys prior research on continuing training of adults. In Chapter 2, some aggregate measures using harmonized data from the European surveys of training are constructed and analyzed; a set of stylized facts concerning differences in the level of training across European countries are discussed based on these aggregate measures. Chapter 3 presents a more formal analysis of the robustness of cross-country differences in the level of training; cross-country rank correlations are calculated between the various measures of training. A concluding section considers some policy implications for in this area.