European Day 2013: Practical Approaches to Skills Monitoring in Regional and Local Labour Market Observatories

There are several reasons why monitoring informal skills on the regional and local level can be challenging: quantitative data is often available only on the highly aggregated level of professions and qualifications, the skills requirements of companies are difficult to capture, comparisons between sectors can be complicated. Over the past years, regional and local labour market observatories have developed innovative approaches to overcome these difficulties and enhance the transparency in the field of skills monitoring. The European Day of the EN RLMM provided an opportunity for discussing these different methods and exploring the ways how they can be transferred across regions or localities in different European countries.

Furthermore, it explored how the EU Skills Panorama, can be used in regional labour market monitoring. The EU Skills Panorama was established by the European Commission with the aim to improve transparency for jobseekers, workers, companies and public institutions by bringing together data and analyses on current and future skills needs on the labour markets at sectoral and national level. However, a lot of excellent skills and labour market intelligence already exists at regional and local level within the EU Member States. The European Day offered a platform for discussing how it would be possible to interrelate the available expertise with the EU Skills Panorama development.