Strategic approaches to skills development
Education and skills are central for both economic performance and societal well-being. This insight has been increasingly addressed by policy-makers on national and European level. In order to address these overarching challenges, an increasing share of countries have used strategic policy documents in the area of skills policy. However, the overall goals and orientation of different strategies and their proposed actions can vary substantially. Policy-making in industrialised economies has long focused on the benefits of acquiring skills for realizing prospective economic returns via access to well-paid jobs, but the importance of skills for a wider range of social and human/personal development aspects has in part also been taken up by policy-making.
The tensions between such different orientations and approaches will be analysed as part of Work Package 2 of the Skills2Capabilities project under the lead of 3s. In a first deliverable of Work Package 2, we provide a review of the literature, present our analytical framework for analysing skills strategies as well as our empirical approach, and present our analysis of strategic policy documents on skills at the hand of six country case studies, capturing the strategic document’s main foci, their comprehensiveness and the extent of their implementation.
The Working Paper can be downloaded here.
Link to the Skill2Capabilities project website.
Contact: Daniel Unterweger
Client: Horizon Europe
