Skill needs in enterprises Working group III report Rapporteur: Mark Keese OECD

1. Skill needs in enterprises Working group III report Rapporteur: Mark Keese OECD Skill need in enterprises: working group report

2. Objective: Identify role of enterprise surveys for providing relevant information on skill needs • Olga Strietska-Ilina (SKILLSNET) provided an overview of the key issues: • Enterprise surveys can provide information on qualitative aspects of skill needs to complement quantitative analysis/forecasts. • Advantage of enterprise surveys is that employers can provide first-hand information on skill needs but: • Response burden on enterprises may lead to low response rate • Employers may only reply cursorily and subjectively • And they may be quite short-sighted • These drawbacks can be overcome: • Carefully select companies and ask relatively few questions • Complement with focus group discussions • Treat results cautiously and combine with information collected elsewhere • General agreement among country experts that there are possibilities for making national surveys more comparable and found SKILLSNET initiative timely and necessary Skill need in enterprises: working group report

3. Germana Di Domenico (European Commission) and Jean-Louis Zanda (ANPE) presented an overview of surveys containing information on recruitment difficulties: • Many surveys already exist both nationally and at the European level but with very different purposes, methodologies and frequency • Administrative data on vacancies (and registered unemployment) can provide measures of recruitment difficulties but: • Requires long time series to interpret differences across occupations and to separate cyclical from structural trends • Currently, European-comparable data lacks detailed occupational breakdown • Important to distinguish the reason for a recruitment difficulty as may not be always because of skill shortage • Thus, further effort is required to provide: • More detailed and comparable data by occupation • More detailed data identifying reasons for recruitment difficulties Skill need in enterprises: working group report

4. Friederike Behringer (BIBB) presented findings from CVTS3 on skill needs in enterprises: • CVTS has questions on skill needs • recruitment because of new skill needs • assessment of skill and training needs • But changed over time and so difficult to look at trends • Questions on skill needs not asked of all enterprises in CVTS3 • Results raise more questions than answers • Why is there a high share of enterprises with no new skill needs or assessment of skill needs? • Do enterprises adequately assess their skill needs or are the questions asked in CVTS not the right questions? • What is the situation in very small enterprises? • CVTS has potential to identify skill needs but requires further development and greater standardisation and quality control which may not be easy to achieve Skill need in enterprises: working group report

5. Conclusions • Enterprise surveys can provide a useful tool for identifying skill needs • But we need to identify more clearly what we want to collect, for whom and why • Need to collect data on soft skills and actual job tasks, not just on formal qualifications • OECD’s new survey on adult skills, PIAAC, may provide guidance here • Progress can be made through further harmonisation of existing national and European enterprise surveys and surveys of recruitment difficulties • But may be difficult to adapt existing mandatory European surveys such as CVTS • Is there a role for a Eurobarometer-type survey but of enterprises rather than individuals? • SKILLSNET has a vital role to play in carrying this agenda forward Skill need in enterprises: working group report