Cross-Sectorial Conference on Strategic Partnership Between Business and Education Sectors

The Commissioner Marianne Thyssen has stated in her speech ‘Avoiding a lost generation’: Despite being the generation with the highest education attainment ever, today's young have paid the highest price for the crisis…However, high levels of unemployment co-exist with 2 million unfilled vacancies, an indicator that some people lack the right skills or mobility. In Europe, the megatrends known by all such as globalisation, digitalisation and demographic change create an important impact on labour markets and businesses. A high percentage (40%) of European face a significant difficulty in finding employees those have the skills needed to grow and innovate. And also, 70 million Europeans lack adequate reading and writing skills and even more have poor numeracy and digital skills. The labour market is constantly evolving. Skills, competences, and qualifications that people need change over time. To deal with these changes people need to be equipped with a variety of basic skills, including literacy, numeracy, foreign languages, science and digital skills. Transversal skills, such as the ability to learn and initiative-taking, will help people deal with today's varied and unpredictable career paths. Entrepreneurial skills will help contribute to employability of young people in particular, as well as supporting new business creation. Furthermore it is important to better identify and manage the availability of required skills, competences, and qualifications, and to help preventing skills gaps and mismatches. Effective communication between the labour market and the education and training sector is vital. It is very clear that we all face the similar problems (shortage of skills, skills gap, skills mismatch etc.) in our countries with almost similar reasons. It seems that Europe is taking some steps to deal with the issue such as; - Rethinking Education - Key competences of lifelong learning - The Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan - The Digital Skills and Jobs Coalition As the potential participants of this conference a platform we will create a platform; - to define and well understand the problem - to talk about on-going initiatives by EU - to exchange information about national and local actions - to share best experiences - to create partnerships for future With the participation of youth, education and labour sectors we might be able to see a cross-sectorial approach to the issue. Why three sectors together in this event? It is being highly discussed that the education cannot meet with the demands of labour sector. It is also being accepted by many that solely formal education will not be able to face the challenges of the rapid changes. There is always a gap. Most of the skills being requested and to be requested in future are highly related with the soft skills. At this point, non formal learning and youth work might have a really great role in bridging this gap.