- 2023Design
- 2024Design
Background
Increasing demands for competences in the world of work and society have contributed to a development in policy that focuses more on skills to meet societal challenges. A comprehensive and targeted skills policy is central to achieving the goals of the most relevant skills in working life and good productivity. It is also connected with the goal of having as few as possible outside the working life. It is crucial that the skills policy is developed and anchored together with the social partners. Cooperation with social partners is important for adaptability and skills, and it must be safeguarded and strengthened. With increasing labour shortages, demographic changes and generally high and increasing demands for adaptability, it is becoming more important to have good framework conditions for lifelong learning.
Objectives
The committee aims to investigate how the social partners can better facilitate adjustment and learning in working life, given the overarching goal of high stable employment, to counteract increasing inequality and ensure the skills needed in the world of work. The backdrop for the committee is the skills needed for working life, considering trends such as an aging population, green transition and digitalisation.
Description
The purpose of the Skills reform committee is to make structured proposals so that skills reform contributes to the development of skills for the green transition, increased innovation and competitiveness and good public welfare services. The reform will help to reduce recruitment challenges and prevent dropouts from working life as a result of a lack of skills. The work of the committee must embrace all groups in working life, and the committee must come up with proposals for measures that hit all levels of education. There is a skewed distribution of who participates in competence-enhancing measures, and different groups have different needs and barriers to participation. The committee must look in particular at measures to increase participation among the employees with the greatest need for skills development. The committee must look at these issues, bearing in mind that there is great variation in challenges in working life and between the public and private sectors. The committee report is due in December 2024.
The committee was established in June 2023. It was appointed by the eight main associations of the social partners and the Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development (KDD). The committee consists of one head, one representative from each association, and one representative from the Ministry of Digitalisation and Public Governance.
The committee held eight meetings in 2024 and collected input from the labour market sector for the report, expected in December.
Bodies responsible
- Ministry of Education and Research (KD)
Target groups
Learners
- Learners in upper secondary, including apprentices
- Young people (15-29 years old)
- Young people not in employment, education or training (NEETs)
- Learners with migrant background, including refugees
- Learners at risk of early leaving or/and early leavers
- Learners with disabilities
- Adult learners
- Older workers and employees (55 - 64 years old)
- Unemployed and jobseekers
- Persons in employment, including those at risk of unemployment
- Low-skilled/qualified persons
- Learners from other groups at risk of exclusion (minorities, people with fewer opportunities due to geographical location or social-economic disadvantaged position)
Entities providing VET
- Companies
- VET providers (all kinds)
Thematic categories
Governance of VET and lifelong learning
This thematic category looks at existing legal frameworks providing for strategic, operational – including quality assurance – and financing arrangements for VET and lifelong learning (LLL). It examines how VET and LLL-related policies are placed in broad national socioeconomic contexts and coordinate with other strategies and policies, such as economic, social and employment, growth and innovation, recovery and resilience.
This thematic category covers partnerships and collaboration networks of VET stakeholders – especially the social partners – to shape and implement VET in a country, including looking at how their roles and responsibilities for VET at national, regional and local levels are shared and distributed, ensuring an appropriate degree of autonomy for VET providers to adapt their offer.
The thematic category also includes efforts to create national, regional and sectoral skills intelligence systems (skills anticipation and graduate tracking) and using skills intelligence for making decisions about VET and LLL on quality, inclusiveness and flexibility.
This thematic sub-category refers to the integration of VET into economic, industrial, innovation, social and employment strategies, including those linked to recovery, green and digital transitions, and where VET is seen as a driver for innovation and growth. It includes national, regional, sectoral strategic documents or initiatives that make VET an integral part of broader policies, or applying a mix of policies to address an issue VET is part of, e.g. in addressing youth unemployment measures through VET, social and active labour market policies that are implemented in combination. National skill strategies aiming at quality and inclusive lifelong learning also fall into this sub-category.
This thematic sub-category refers both to formal mechanisms of stakeholder engagement in VET governance and to informal cooperation among stakeholders, which motivate shared responsibility for quality VET. Formal engagement is usually based on legally established institutional procedures that clearly define the role and responsibilities for relevant stakeholders in designing, implementing and improving VET. It also refers to establishing and increasing the degree of autonomy of VET providers for agile and flexible VET provision.
In terms of informal cooperation, the sub-category covers targeted actions by different stakeholders to promote or implement VET. This cooperation often leads to creating sustainable partnerships and making commitments for targeted actions, in line with the national context and regulation, e.g. national alliances for apprenticeships, pacts for youth or partnerships between schools and employers. It can also include initiatives and projects run by the social partners or sectoral organisations or networks of voluntary experts and executives, retired or on sabbatical, to support their peers in the fields of VET and apprenticeships, as part of the EAfA.
European priorities in VET
Osnabrück Declaration
- Establishing a new lifelong learning culture - relevance of continuing VET and digitalisation
Subsystem
Further reading
Country
Type of development
Cedefop, & ReferNet. (2025). The skills reform committee: Norway. In Cedefop, & ReferNet. (2025). Timeline of VET policies in Europe (2024 update) [Online tool].
https://www.cedefop.europa.eu/en/tools/timeline-vet-policies-europe/search/47243