Public Employment Services are actively building a broad coalition working to address labour and skills shortages in Europe through coordinated employment, upskilling, mobility and digitisation policies. Discover the results of this collaboration on national and European level in a recent paper of the PES Network looking at how to prepare for Europe’s future labour market.

Find practical inspiration for how PES and their partners can work to build labour market resilience and meet the evolving needs of employers and jobseekers in a new paper from the European PES Network on: “Jointly addressing labour and skills shortages, preparing for Europe's Future Labour Market”.

The paper highlights the urgency of labour and skills shortages with a “decade-long increase” in the job vacancy rate. At the same time, “13.27 million persons are unemployed in the EU as of February 2022”. Key causes are significant labour market disruption from both short-term (e.g. COVID-19) and long-term factors (e.g. twin digital and green transitions). Certain sectors such as hospitality, care or the health sector are particularly impacted. Quality of jobs is key to improving attractiveness in shortage sectors.

PES can be at the cutting edge of modern responses, including through tailored sector-specific pathways for jobseekers, increased investment in the digitalisation of employment services (particularly vacancy handling) and sharing real-time data on key labour market trends.

In response, the paper emphasises the need for multi-faceted interventions by the ecosystem of labour market actors, including: basic employability training; upskilling, retraining and retention of workers; enhanced recruitment; but also significant reallocation of labour. All of these should be grounded in evidence-based analysis of labour market trends - “everything starts with data” - and supported by effective communication.

This ‘synthesis paper’ supports these messages and key findings with practical examples of inspiring initiatives from PES and their partners that were showcased at the 2022 PES Network Stakeholder Conference.