Level: SUPRA-NATIONAL
- The EU Skills Panorama is the Pan-European online labour market and skills information system. It was initially managed by the European Commission, but Cedefop has since been entrusted with its further development.
- Skills Panorama has recently celebrated three years of providing skills and labour market intelligence. Originally it was designed to serve the needs of policy-makers, but it has now added eight new indicators that provide valuable information for career guidance practitioners too. An important part of career guidance is to provide information on skill requirements and the availability of jobs. Some of the key questions career guidance practitioners are asked include: 'What are the future prospects of a specific job?', 'What tasks will I be doing?', 'How much will I make?' or 'What education do I need for a certain job?'
The new version of the Skills Panorama online platform was launched in June 2018: https://skillspanorama.cedefop.europa.eu/en
The Skills Panorama distinguishes itself from other labour market information websites available in the EU and has the following major advantages:
- Skills Panorama blends quantitative data with analysis and contextual information, providing very detailed and unique country comparisons.
- Skills Panorama combines many different datasets – Eurostat, OECD, Eurofound and its own Cedefop datasets – to provide a very rich picture of the European labour market
- Cedefop’s datasets: the European Skills and Jobs Survey and the Skills Forecast; and in the future two other datasets: employer skills needs from online job vacancies (Big Data) and the new survey on skills needs and development in the so-called 'platform economy'.
Skills Panorama explained in pictures
As of the end of November 2018:
- 60% of users were researchers and policy-makers;
- Students made up less than 15%;
- Over 125 thousand visitors.
Renewed and enriched content:
- 50 occupations;
- 21 economic sectors;
- 28 countries;
- 50+ indicators;
- 2000+ dashboards;
- 160+ analytical highlights.
The Skills Panorama meaningfully combines and synthesises a wealth of sources. It blends data, articles and short briefs in an interactive and visually engaging way, making information on labour markets and trends in jobs and skills more accessible.
Features of the new version that are already operational include:
- An improved search engine, based on the ESCO classification, so that users can identify what they are looking for more quickly and easily;
- A section on Institutions providing labour market intelligence (LMI) at the national level in each Member State;
- LMI guides and toolkits form a new section under 'Resources' with the aim of giving users access to all relevant tools;
- A new edition of the European skills index (ESI).
Upcoming results, features and tools (currently in development) include:
- A visualisation tool offering a new way of interacting with individual indicators;
- New indicators, such as the importance of tasks within occupations and data on wages and unemployment levels for occupations;
- New dashboards on innovative, growing sectors and skills;
- The first results of Cedefop’s vacancy analysis.
Other supra-national Labour Market/Skills Observatories
There are other Observatories that network and share information on topics and issues of common interest in a number of European cross-border employment spaces. Such networking is a reality, for example in the case of the 'Greater Region', which comprises Luxembourg and its neighbouring regions from Belgium, France and Germany. In this context, in 1998 the Interregional Observatory of Employment (IEO) was established to gather, compare and analyse information on the economy and employment in the Greater Region. The IEO consists of a network of public services from the Greater Region, and its coordination and secretariat is assured by the INFO-Institut in Saarbrücken. The IEO interregional steering committee defines the priority tasks and oversees the activities undertaken. Besides its analysis for policy-makers, the IEO provides insights to other actors and stakeholders. It can therefore be considered as a cross-border system of diagnostic of socio-economic developments. The IEO has closely cooperated with the European Job Mobility Portal (EURES). In 2001 a number of new tasks were entrusted to the IEO, notably: labour market forecasting; contributing to matching labour market needs and skills; and formulating proposals for the public management of the labour market.
The European Network on Regional Labour Market Monitoring (EN RLMM) can be considered as an Observatory across Europe. Founded in 2005 at Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, institutes, organisations and companies from 26 countries are members of this Network. The Network operates on a not-for-profit basis to further the concepts and instruments used in regional and local labour market monitoring and to disseminate the common methods for study, research and analysis in this field.
Every year, the EN RLMM focuses on one particular aspect of regional and local labour market monitoring with the objective of capturing the state of the art in research terms and further the available monitoring concepts and methods through mutual learning. The annual anthology published by the Network is open to both researchers and practitioners who would like to present good practice examples from different regions and localities, but also discuss the challenges in regional and local labour market monitoring. The annual conferences of the EN RLMM – the European Day and the Annual Meeting – offer Network members a further opportunity to present their work and exchange their experiences with their colleagues. More details can be found at: http://www.regionallabourmarketmonitoring.net/