Annual Topics

The reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is one of the main long-term policy goals of the European Union and individual European states. This is impacting on a broad range of political activities and policies as it is defined in particular by the environmental taxonomy regulation of the EU. This green transformation will affect a lot of areas of the labour market, requiring new skills and qualifications and impacting the nature and geographic location of employer demand.

The “Decade of Action” to achieve sustainable development requires an appropriate functionality of regional and local labour markets as primary players of the digital and green transformation towards this shared strategic goal. The digital and green transformation of regional and local labour markets in Europe sets a fundamental orientation towards the future, which at the same time has to cope with existing challenges, some of which have been intensified by the pandemic.

The COVID-19 health crisis has turned into a global economic crisis, putting at risk the health, jobs, and incomes of millions of people around the world. The real economic impact dimension of the pandemic is unknown yet, but what we already know is that the impact is already different at the  regional, and even local levels. Implicitly the consequences for the labour market will follow the same pattern, having heterogeneous effects according to the different industrial branches and  the level of jobs affected by restrictive measures.

SMEs are the backbone of the European economy, but in regional and local labour market monitoring approaches their specificities are not yet well considered. As SMEs have to compete with larger companies for human resources, they develop creative strategies for recruiting and retaining employees. This overall flexible approach proves to be a good tactic for staying in business, e.g. during a pandemic.

The scope of informal economy and the forms of informal employment differ greatly between countries. Therefore, studying the role of informal employment in the labour market from a comparative perspective provides important insights into economic and social developments in regions and localities.

The world of work is changing fundamentally and quickly as a result of technological transformation, demographic development and globalisation. 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.

Information resulting from the monitoring of labour markets is an important source for evidence-based policy-making. However, local and regional labour market observatories often find it difficult to impart their information and knowledge to decision-makers so that it can be incorporated into the policy-making process.

Megatrends such as demographic change, globalisation and digitalisation influence all societal spheres, be it the economy, labour market, education or culture. Consequently, it is important to estimate how strong these effects are and collect qualitative information on the nature of their impact. Whilst the effects of demographic change and globalisation have already been broadly discussed, changes resulting from digital transformation have scarcely been reflected upon systematically, especially in the case of labour markets.

The experience of regional and local labour market observatories shows that information on some aspects of the labour market – such as the demand for skilled labour in certain sectors or spatial units – is difficult to obtain. In the recent years, ICT-related innovations have created new forms and types of data that can be used for enhancing the efficiency in several areas of economic activity. So far, the vast amount of unstructured data contained in the World Wide Web – Big Data – has been largely unexploited.

In the past years, sustainability has again become a theme in both academic and political discourses. Even though they often focus on green(ing) jobs and skills as recently emerged policy fields, also the different aspects of sustainable employment are increasingly receiving attention.

Over the years, regional and local labour market observatories have provided reliable and targeted labour market information and intelligence for regional and local decision-makers. Recent developments show that they are increasingly expected to fulfil tasks beyond mere data provision and analysis. Hence, they are emerging as interpreters, evaluators and mediators in regional and local governance and development efforts. Their participation in the planning, implementation and evaluation processes creates spaces for new alliances, cooperations and networks.

Transparency on the supply and demand of skills in a locality or region is crucial for employees, unemployed, training and placement organisations, as well as for enterprises and labour politics as all of these actors are influential for effective skills matching. In recent years, in numerous regions across Europe, skills monitoring has been implemented to provide this transparency. This anthology gives a broad overview on different approaches and good practice examples in regional or local skills monitoring. It also demonstrates how regional or local framework conditions can influence the implementation of specific concepts within skills monitoring.

Geographical mobility in Europe is a chance and a challenge for regional labour markets. There is an unknown potential for the economy as foreign labour markets may provide qualified workers and the freedom of movement brings more flexibility. On the other hand, national and regional politics face the challenge of developing systematic approaches for enhancing mobility and managing its consequences. Transparency of migration flows, a sound database and substantiated knowledge about geographical mobility is the prerequisite for all actors.

Fighting unemployment, especially among the young, is an important goal of many actors working at the regional labour market level. The transparency of the processes of the regional labour market is an important prerequisite for the systematic application of measures and other strategies to help reducing youth unemployment. With the instruments of regional labour market monitoring, a high degree of transparency can be continuously maintained.

Regional labour market monitoring based on web-based labour market information systems is becoming increasingly more common. Two general types of systems can be distinguished. The first are regionally-based information tools and secondly, national systems with regional sub-divisions.

Target Group Monitoring is a regional approach to generate data to cover adequately the information needs of labour market actors. Applied onto migrants as a target group of labour market politics, the central elements of these approaches need to be discussed with respect to their suitability for other target groups, such as older or young employees, low-skilled and skilled workers.

Regional factors are important for the economy and employment in highly competitive, international markets. As a precondition for the functioning of regional labour markets, adequate information has to be generated and transformed into new knowledge – for all actors involved. Regional Labour Market Monitoring can be seen as an approach to meet these requirements.