Q. What led you to VET research, and how did you get interested in forecasting?
My background is in economics. Early on I worked at the employment agency, and in parallel did my doctorate about the economics of education. Very quickly I saw that economics were only part of the story. When it comes to socially-oriented questions, we need to take into account things like individual decisions and backgrounds, to look at how jobs are shaped by people, to examine what occupational identities they require.
At the same time, it’s important not to lose view of the main topic - jobs! What kind of jobs are available? How should people go about making decisions about their professional futures? What risks and opportunities are associated with these decisions? When studying employment and education you see the time lag between job changes and education provision. The question of how to anticipate labour market changes is one that I’ve been working on since.
Q. What are the challenges of anticipating such changes?
The purpose of a skills forecast is to orient policy-makers - among other things, by warning them of possible undesired results or distortions on the labour market. If they take these warnings seriously and take measures to avoid the predicted distortions, then the forecast will be wrong! But of course this is the intention of every early warning system – to be a “self-destroying prophecy”!
Q. Can you give us an example of such results of forecasts?
Oh yes. It’s too early to tell for our Cedefop forecasts, but I can give you examples from Germany. In the 80s there was a discussion to restrict access to university. We forecast the need for more graduates and more people with high-level vocational training. Our forecast was one of the factors that pointed policy-makers in that direction. As a result, of course, we ended up having more university graduates than we had forecast so the danger we were warning of did not come to pass.
In the mid-90s we warned against the proposed restrictions on training places, demonstrating that the effect of such measures would be to take low-skilled people out of the labour market. This warning was taken on board by policy-makers and the proposed restrictions were eased.
Q. What would you say is the lesson for policy-makers from Cedefop’s current forecast?
First, it would be to encourage people and companies to take a more holistic view of skills. For policy-makers, the main message is to avoid skills mismatches, which have very negative effects on the labour market, economy and society. Misinvestments in education and training have enormous social and economic costs.
But it’s equally important to avoid taking too narrow a view of matching skills to jobs. Change in job content does not only imply adaptation on the part of workers, it's also the shaping of jobs by those who do them. We should not reduce skills to what the market wants at specific moments.
If you look around your workplace, it becomes clear that not everything we do can be found in our job descriptions. The knowledge economy is predicated on increased autonomy, so it’s important for us to use our skills and knowledge in order to make changes. I think employers are increasingly aware that you cannot anticipate the exact tasks of a job in the next four of five years. Instead, you need people who can deal with these changes and show the necessary autonomy.
Of course it goes both ways: to exercise this autonomy you need to have the right work environment! If the employer does not provide this environment, creativity is stifled and in the longer term the enterprise itself – and the economy – will suffer.
Q. You have been on the frontier between research and policy for most of your career. How do you think they can they best work together?
At Cedefop. our results must be of immediate relevance to policy-making. We must be able to show options for policy-making, and to examine the effects of policies. But we should be clear about what research can and cannot offer. Our societies are very complex, and these complexities cannot be reduced to simple schemes.
A good analogy of what we do is to think of it as a SWOT analysis, which is incidentally a very practical tool for both individuals and policy-makers. It’s useful to think of your personal strong and weak points, and the opportunities and threats in your environment. An analysis of this kind can also be very useful for policymakers. One threat, for instance, is that because policy cannot steer individual decisions, nobody can guarantee exactly what individuals will decide to study or how many jobs in an occupation will be available.
The deeper you go into research, the more you realise that there are no simple answers to your questions. We don’t live in a planned economy. In all situations, there are many possible outcomes, many options, and many ways to contributed to social change.