The European Commission’s new Fair Labour Mobility package marks an important step towards making the European single market also a qualifications and skills market.
At the heart of the package is a simple but powerful idea: people should be able to move, work, progress, and access education and training across Europe without their qualifications and skills being kept on hold at the border. As Commission President Ursula von der Leyen noted, the single market must become ‘a genuine skills market’. This reflects a growing policy awareness that labour mobility cannot function effectively unless skills and qualifications can be clearly understood, compared and, where necessary, formally recognised across borders.
This matters for individuals seeking new opportunities, for employers trying to recruit the talent they need, and for Europe as a whole. By linking skills portability, qualifications recognition, digitalisation, social protection and enforcement, the package brings the promise of the single market closer to people’s everyday reality: fewer barriers to mobility, faster procedures, and stronger trust in cross-border labour markets.
Its timing is significant. Europe is facing persistent skills shortages, demographic pressures and rapid labour market change. Making better use of the talent already present across the Union is therefore both an economic necessity and a social priority. As Executive Vice-President Roxana Mînzatu underlined, fair labour mobility is about ‘empowerment’: enabling people to work across Europe with their rights protected and their qualifications recognised faster.
For Cedefop, this is a highly relevant agenda. The agency’s work on the Skills Portability Initiative shows that, despite substantial progress, important challenges remain. These include uneven implementation of tools supporting learning outcomes, fragmented recognition and validation procedures, limited interoperability between information systems and registers, and insufficient coordination and trust across education, training and labour market actors.
Cedefop’s analysis points in particular to the need to strengthen the role of learning outcomes as a common reference point for transparency, recognition, validation and recruitment. More coherent use of learning outcomes can improve interoperability across the European Qualifications Framework (EQF), national qualifications frameworks (NQFs), Europass, ESCO and emerging digital credential ecosystems, helping make qualifications more transparent, comparable and portable across countries and sectors.
This is closely linked to Cedefop’s longstanding work on qualifications frameworks, validation of non-formal and informal learning, microcredentials, digital credentials, and methodologies for comparing and recognising VET qualifications — all of which form part of the infrastructure needed to support fair labour mobility and lifelong learning in a changing European labour market.
Improving the portability and permeability of skills and qualifications is no longer optional; it is imperative. If Europe is to become a true Union of skills, people need systems that make their learning visible, their qualifications understandable, and their competences trusted across borders.
The Commission package moves Europe in that direction. Cedefop will continue to contribute evidence, analysis and practical tools to support that effort — helping to make mobility easier, fairer, more inclusive and more effective.