Piloting a European Employer Survey on Skill Needs: Illustrative Findings. Research Paper No 36

Today, information and data on skills development come mainly from household and employees surveys: trends in the labour market, demand and supply of skills, data on skill mismatch and skills obsolescence. Recurrent analysis of individual cross-sectional data and their extrapolation into the future indicates significant structural changes over time. Despite the critical nature of such structural data, they do not allow one to understand fully the complexity of changing skill requirements and developments in occupations at the workplace. Therefore, Cedefop, with financial support from the European Commission has taken a step forward by developing a European employer survey on skill needs. Cedefop worked, in close cooperation with experts, to develop and evaluate innovative approaches for measuring skill needs from the employers' point of view. The pilot survey focuses on testing questions on the importance of generic skill requirements and specific working tasks, as well as relevant changes in defined occupations. It also collected information on drivers of change, such as innovation, and their impact on skill requirements at the workplace to broaden the perspective on future needs. The survey also piloted questions on staff preparedness to meet new requirements, and firms' policies to address this issue. This publication describes in brief the measurement concept and the survey methodology tested in the pilot survey to identify current and future skill needs as perceived by employers in Europe. It provides illustrative findings with some implications to be followed up in future work, as well as an assessment of the approach's practicability and options for moving to a large-scale employer survey on skill needs in Europe. A tabular annex provides the share of employment covered by the survey. [The publication is a result of development work under a contract between Cedefop and TNS Infratest Socialfoschung.]