European Day 2015: Supporting Sustainable Labour Market Development: The Role of Observatories and Intermediaries in European Regions and Localities

Our experience shows that information on the current and future developments in labour market — provided by regional and local labour market observatories — is crucial for devising and steering regional/local economic development strategies. At the same time, different intermediaries are needed to ensure the alignment of the various fields of the strategies. Therefore, the European Day of the EN RLMM was concerned with the aligning of VET and regional/local economic development strategies and focused on the role of labour market observatories and other intermediaries in these processes. It explored the various types of intermediaries already existing in many European regions and localities as well as the differences in their constellations depending on the framework conditions and regional/local challenges. We proposed a typology of intermediaries, compared the patterns of their embeddedness and functioning across the regions/localities and explored the issues associated with transferring them into different contexts.