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

Christa Larsen, Sigrid Rand, Alfons Schmid, Andrew Dean (Eds.)

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.

The Importance of Governance in Regional Labour Market Monitoring for Evidence-based Policy-making

Christa Larsen, Sigrid Rand, Alfons Schmid, Tilman Nagel, Heike Hoess, Heike (Eds.)

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. This anthology explores the mechanisms, which ensure the relevance of labour market information for policy-makers on the regional and local level. It presents cases of regional and local labour market observatories that have been successful in transferring their monitoring information into policy-making. In the descriptions of the cases, concepts from governance research are used to analyse how the successful connections between data provision and evidence-based policy-making are implemented.

Digital (R)evolution and Its Effects on Labour:
Opportunities and Challenges for Regional and Local Labour Market Monitoring

Christa Larsen, Sigrid Rand, Alfons Schmid, Päivi Holopainen, Pirita Jokikaarre, Katri Kuusela, Niina Alapuranen (Eds.)

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. Against this background, the European Network on Regional Labour Market Monitoring (EN RLMM) has chosen the digital transformation of societies and economies and its effects on labour as its guiding theme for 2016. Together with the members of the network, we seek to present the state of the current knowledge, specify first action requests and options and capture the relevance of digital transformation for regional and local labour market monitoring. The current anthology of the EN RLMM constitutes the first building block in this process: it brings together contributions discussing the effects of digital transformation on specific sectors and occupations as well as labour market target groups. Furthermore, it contains regional good practice examples describing and analysing the digital transformations of regions.