Labour markets and skill needs are constantly evolving. Most EU Member States face high unemployment rates, particularly among the youth, and worrying levels of skills mismatch. Particularly pertinent to tackling these challenges, the Skills Panorama is a unique online platform that offers a single entry point to information on skills needs and labour markets in the EU. It aims to help its users make informed decisions or choices on education, training and employment issues.
The Skills Panorama is an initiative of the European Commission. The Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion ensures the strategic steering to the Skills Panorama in line with EU policy objectives, and has given a mandate to Cedefop (the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training) for the technical development of the site, and the provision of data and information.
The platform does not only offer data and information. It selects and presents that information so that policymakers and policy experts can keep up with the latest developments, make useful comparisons or identify anticipated changes. In that way, Skills Panorama addresses issues of high-level political importance in the EU, namely skills shortages as well as high unemployment, in the form of clear, reliable, open and relevant skills and labour market intelligence. Consequently, the aim is to offer clear data and evidence on a number of complex challenges such as the impact of economic uncertainty, low economic growth, demographic change and technological advancements on jobs and skills.
The Skills Panorama is a platform open to the public. Policymakers and experts are the primary target groups but the site also attracts researchers, and employment and guidance counsellors. The platform disseminates research findings and skills-pertinent news through marketing campaigns and social media, thus potentially reaching the wider public that needs to make informed choices on education and training as well as employment in EU countries.
Information in the Skills Panorama is structured in a series of ‘dashboards’ (over 2000 unique dashboards in total). The dashboards are organised by occupation, sector, country, policy theme and indicator. To amplify the users’ benefits and experience, filters can be applied leading to cross-cutting dashboards.
Besides the quantitative information and visualisations contained in dashboards, the Skills Panorama offers high-quality skills intelligence in different formats, to meet different needs of users:
- analytical highlights on skill needs and labour market developments in occupations, sectors, countries, policy themes;
- a blog with articles on skills, authored by Cedefop experts;
- useful resources such as reports and glossaries;
- news and events.
Innovativeness lies at the very core of the Skills Panorama. The key innovative feature of the platform is offering skills intelligence, rather than only quantitative data. Blending quantitative data (indicators and charts) and qualitative content (e.g. analytical highlights) the Skills Panorama provides an interactive, user-friendly and visually engaging user experience. It therefore provides users with transparency on which skills are more relevant for the labour market and on other developments of employment and skill needs.
The platform combines a wealth of sources and indicators, meaningfully synthesised and aggregated, such as Cedefop, Eurostat and the OECD. Using the latter data sources provides a robust basis for ensuring continued data availability. Coupled with secured strategic and financial support by the European Commission and Cedefop, the sustainability and further development of the platform are ensured.
The Skills Panorama also serves as a unique access point of research outcomes both for relevant Cedefop output and from other constituencies. Research projects developed specifically for the Skills Panorama (such as occupational analytical highlights, the Making Skills Work Index, mismatch occupations by country) offer skills intelligence that users cannot find elsewhere.
Users’ needs drive the Skills Panorama developments. It is the user experience that guides the design, development and user testing of the website. This is in line with the core principles of being clear, reliable, open and relevant to users. The user-centric approach is also endorsed by the very good results of our satisfaction poll.
Skills Panorama addresses challenges that many European countries face and thus also holds valuable lessons for other administrations. This is demonstrated by the interest expressed by stakeholders from Member States and non-EU countries who are inspired by the Skills Panorama to deliver new services in their particular context. The high level of user satisfaction (over 76% of users find what they are looking for and out of these, 92% are satisfied or very satisfied) equally underlines the importance and relevance of this exceptional project.