Cedefop newsletter

This supply-demand imbalance leads to underutilised resources, higher costs, and delayed adoption of transformative technologies, ultimately dampening productivity across sectors. 

To support policymakers at both national and European levels, and to inform future policies aimed at addressing labour and skills shortages, Cedefop has introduced its new Labour and Skills Shortage Index (LSSI), designed to:

• Investigate occupational shortages through 2035 across various occupational groups for each Member State, leveraging data from Cedefop’s 2025 Skills Forecast.
• Guide policies that strengthen vocational education and training (VET) systems, ensuring better alignment between skills supply and market demand. 

Cedefop Labour and Skills Shortage Index (LSSI)

Cedefop new LSSI analyse labour market trends through 2035 and evaluates occupational shortages across three key factors:

• Demand measures the pressure created by employment growth. High-growth occupations may face delays in securing workers with appropriate skills, as education and training systems often lag market needs.
• Supply focuses on replacement needs, driven by retirements, career changes, and other workforce exits, which often create more opportunities than new job creation.
• Imbalances examine mismatches in the labour market, where either underqualification or overqualification undermines efficiency and satisfaction.

The LSSI reveals labour shortages estimated to manifest by 2035 across all skill levels:

• High-skilled occupations, including legal, social, and cultural professionals, face significant shortages due to strong employment growth and replacement demands. Health professionals are also critically affected, with resource-intensive training needs compounding the issue.
• Medium-skilled roles, such as service and sales workers, experience multifaceted shortages, driven by demand, supply challenges, and imbalances.
• Low-skilled positions, including personal care and manual labour, are particularly affected by replacement needs, exacerbated by difficult working conditions and demographic pressures.

The index also shows high variability across Member States:

•  High-skilled shortages dominate in countries like Slovakia, Czechia, Poland, and Italy.
• Low-skilled roles face shortages in Bulgaria and Ireland.
• Broad-spectrum shortages, spanning all skill levels, are evident in Greece, Spain, and the Netherlands.

LSSI: Implications for Policy and Strategy

The LSSI empowers stakeholders to develop comprehensive and forward-thinking strategies to address these critical challenges, by focusing on:

1. Expanding skills intelligence efforts to provide granular insights at the national and occupational levels.
2. Strengthening education and training systems to meet future demands, particularly in high-impact fields such as healthcare and engineering.
3. Leveraging technology and AI to mitigate shortages in low-skilled and repetitive roles, easing the burden on the human workforce.
4. Improving working conditions in low-appeal but high-demand sectors, such as personal care, to attract and retain talent.

Tackling labour shortages is essential to sustaining the EU’s economic competitiveness and social cohesion. With Cedefop’s LSSI, policymakers and stakeholders have a powerful tool to guide their efforts in addressing current challenges and preparing for future opportunities.

EU agency Cedefop launched its first call for tender to test the feasibility of developing a pan-European database of online job advertisements (OJA) almost a decade ago. At the time, big data was seen as a promising new opportunity to complement traditional labour market data sources (e.g. job vacancy surveys, labour force surveys). Big data-powered analysis of online job ads is particularly powerful because it sheds light on the skills impacts of rapid change in job markets that accompanies the transition towards greener and more digital economies and societies. Web-driven labour market and skills intelligence offers policy makers (quasi) real-time and detailed picture of labour market trends and imbalances and strengthens their capacity to develop policies aimed at providing the right skills and occupations and to implement them (see e.g. Napierala and Kvetan 2023). In 2020, Cedefop joined forces with Eurostat and their big data work became part of the Eurostat project on building ‘trusted smart statistics’ as part of the Web Intelligence Hub (WIH).

With advances in big data analytics, natural language processing and machine learning algorithms, the methodologies for analysing web-based labour and skills data have significantly evolved. So far, online job advertisements has been used to extract information for various types of analytical work. Key contributions feature work on:

1. occupations: computer scientist (Grüger & Schneider, 2019), various types of analysts' positions (Nasir et al., 2020), and public health jobs (Watts et al., 2019);
2. sectors:  IT (Ternikov & Aleksandrova, 2020), tourism (Marrero-Rodríguez et al., 2020), and manufacturing (Leigh et al., 2020);
3. regions: for example work in the Umbria region comparing skills demanded in online job advertisements with skills contained in training and education programmes (OECD 2023);
4. skill demand and labour market shortages: to understand which professions require Artificial Intelligence (AI) skills or green skills and to forecast skills demand (de Macedo et al. (2022);
5. time series analysis of trends in skills requirements: entrepreneurial skills (Prüfer and Prüfer 2019), foreign languages (Fabo et al. 2017), transversal skills (Pater et al. 2019), and changes in journalists’ skills (Dawson, Molitorisz, et al. 2021);
6. the Covid19 pandemic: because other information sources were no longer available (e.g. Kahn et al., 2020);
7. impact of the green transition: e.g. Saussay et al. 2022;
8. competition among employers e.g. Ascheri A. et al. 2022.

The primary aim of this conference is to showcase innovative methods and approaches for analysing and interpreting web data sources applied in the context of occupational, sectoral or topical labour market and/or skills analysis. The insights and findings shared during the conference will contribute to the understanding of how web data sources can be leveraged in labour market and skills research and will pave the way for future research in this area.

Abstract Submission Topics

Cedefop is inviting researchers and analysts to submit cutting-edge research studies that:

• provide original insights into changing trends and patterns in the labour market and skills; and
• use a) OJA data, b) any other web data source (e.g. online work platforms, corporate websites; websites training providers; online training course repositories or MOOCs, websites of formal education system providers; CV repositories or databases) and/or c) a mix of traditional and web data sources.

Cedefop invites researchers to submit abstracts that demonstrate novel methodologies, offer insightful analyses, or provide case studies on using any of the previously mentioned web data sources in the context of labour market and skills research.

The conference will offer a platform where researchers can exchange ideas and information and showcase their work. Cedefop aims to foster a collaborative environment where researchers and practitioners can share their findings, methodologies, and applications that enhance the understanding and usefulness of web data sources. As the conference is organised as an in-person event, participants will have networking opportunities and possibilities for exploring collaboration with peers.

Practicalities

Cedefop will review all abstracts received and will select abstracts (indicatively 10) that are candidates to be presented at the conference. Participation in the conference is free of charge following registration. As places will be limited, participation will be on a first-come, first-served basis.

The conference will be held at EESC premises in the centre of Brussels. Travel and/or accommodation expenses are to be covered by the participants or the institution or body they work for. Cedefop will publish abstracts and presentations on its web portal and will explore opportunities to use leverage them for drafting a short Cedefop publication.

Abstract guidelines and important dates

• Abstracts should be maximum 500 words and provide a clear description of the topic of your presentation and a brief explanation of the innovative potential of the methodological approach. It should also describe what type of data have been used and include one or more key empirical or illustrative findings.
• Abstract Submission Deadline: 10 February 2025 10:00 CET via email @ rlmi@cedefop.europa.eu
• Revision of abstracts completed and communication of (non) acceptance: 14 February 2025
• Pre-registration open for accepted abstracts:  17 February 2025
• Registration open to broader audience: 28 February 2025