Skill need in enterprises: working group report Skill needs in enterprises Working group III report Rapporteur: Mark Keese OECD

Skill need in enterprises: working group report Objective: Identify role of enterprise surveys for providing relevant information on skill needs  Olga Strietska-Ilina (SKILLSNET) provided an overview of the key issues: Enterprise surveys can provide information on qualitative aspects of skill needs to complement quantitative analysis/forecasts. Advantage of enterprise surveys is that employers can provide first-hand information on skill needs but:  Response burden on enterprises may lead to low response rate  Employers may only reply cursorily and subjectively  And they may be quite short-sighted These drawbacks can be overcome:  Carefully select companies and ask relatively few questions  Complement with focus group discussions  Treat results cautiously and combine with information collected elsewhere General agreement among country experts that there are possibilities for making national surveys more comparable and found SKILLSNET initiative timely and necessary

Skill need in enterprises: working group report  Germana Di Domenico (European Commission) and Jean-Louis Zanda (ANPE) presented an overview of surveys containing information on recruitment difficulties: Many surveys already exist both nationally and at the European level but with very different purposes, methodologies and frequency Administrative data on vacancies (and registered unemployment) can provide measures of recruitment difficulties but:  Requires long time series to interpret differences across occupations and to separate cyclical from structural trends  Currently, European-comparable data lacks detailed occupational breakdown Important to distinguish the reason for a recruitment difficulty as may not be always because of skill shortage Thus, further effort is required to provide:  More detailed and comparable data by occupation  More detailed data identifying reasons for recruitment difficulties

Skill need in enterprises: working group report  Friederike Behringer (BIBB) presented findings from CVTS3 on skill needs in enterprises: CVTS has questions on skill needs  recruitment because of new skill needs  assessment of skill and training needs  But changed over time and so difficult to look at trends  Questions on skill needs not asked of all enterprises in CVTS3  Results raise more questions than answers  Why is there a high share of enterprises with no new skill needs or assessment of skill needs?  Do enterprises adequately assess their skill needs or are the questions asked in CVTS not the right questions?  What is the situation in very small enterprises? CVTS has potential to identify skill needs but requires further development and greater standardisation and quality control which may not be easy to achieve

Skill need in enterprises: working group report Conclusions Enterprise surveys can provide a useful tool for identifying skill needs But we need to identify more clearly what we want to collect, for whom and why Need to collect data on soft skills and actual job tasks, not just on formal qualifications  OECD’s new survey on adult skills, PIAAC, may provide guidance here Progress can be made through further harmonisation of existing national and European enterprise surveys and surveys of recruitment difficulties  But may be difficult to adapt existing mandatory European surveys such as CVTS Is there a role for a Eurobarometer-type survey but of enterprises rather than individuals? SKILLSNET has a vital role to play in carrying this agenda forward