Around 50% of European workers do not receive any employer-organised training.
Who fills the gap, and how does learning at work actually happen? To answer these questions, the European Training and Learning Survey (ETLS), gathered data from over 44,000 workers across all 27 EU Member States, Iceland and Norway between late 2023 and early 2024. Unlike other learning surveys, the ETLS goes beyond participation rates and training hours to examine what drives skills development, and who — employer or worker — is responsible for making it happen.
The first findings are now available in Cedefop's recent report.
The workplace factor
Skills development is not driven by any single factor, but by the interaction between the individual and the workplace around them. Motivation, opportunity and ability all play a role, and all three are shaped by context as much as by personal traits.
Motivation to learn cannot be treated as a purely individual characteristic. Pay, managerial support, career progression and the learning norms that prevail in a workplace all influence whether workers engage with learning and to what extent. If workers appear disengaged from training, the problem may lie in the conditions around them rather than in their attitude.
This has direct implications for how the EU and Member States design and target skills policy. Among the strongest predictors of skills growth are:
job autonomy and managerial support for learning
having clear learning goals and knowing what needs to be learned
the perception that learning matters for career progression
manageable workloads that leave room for reflection and development
None of these are purely personal traits — all are shaped by how a workplace is organised and managed. Overly competitive workplace cultures, where individual performance is regularly compared, are linked to lower levels of skills development. When the focus shifts to outperforming colleagues rather than building shared knowledge, the conditions for learning tend to break down.
The full picture
Workers regularly learn by observing colleagues, trying new approaches, reading and reflecting on their own time, and they do so more frequently when employer-organised training is limited or does not meet their needs. Whether this fully compensates for the lack of formal provision remains an open question.
One of the more counterintuitive findings concerns those who felt least prepared.Workers who felt under-skilled at the start of the survey year were also among those who developed the most by its end, suggesting that recognising a gap is often the first step towards closing it.
Building the conditions for learning, policy implications
As Europe pursues competitiveness and resilience through the twin transitions, ensuring workers' skills keep pace with changing demands becomes central. Yet, the data show this rarely happens without deliberate workplace conditions to support it. Workplaces that connect learning to career development and give workers genuine autonomy consistently produce better outcomes than those that do not.
Both the Union of Skills and the Industry 5.0 framework place human-centred workplaces at the heart of Europe's economic strategy. The findings from the ETLS give that ambition a concrete foundation.
They show that learning happens where workers have autonomy, support and a genuine reason to grow — and that these are conditions of workplace design, not individual disposition, and hence something policy can influence.
