It is clear that Europe has a range of advantages and assets which will equip it to play a key role in the global information economy. However building on these assets for the development of a dynamic information society creates new demands on both the supply side and the demand side of the labour market.
Some industries are experiencing a shortage of highly qualified workers in skills in key areas, particularly technical fields, and are having to recruit skilled workers from outside Europe.
Key new knowledge-based industries require a higher level of 'soft' behavioural, communications, problem-solving and self-development skills than traditional sectors. In some cases is estimated that these make up 70% of the requirement, as against 30% contributed by formal qualifications. The educational institutions are not, by and large, delivering labour market entrants with these skills.
Other 'opportunity gaps' can be identified in relation to demographic variables (such as gender and age) and between 'high growth' and 'low growth' regions.
It was the view of conference participants that a number of initiatives might usefully be developed to address these difficulties and speed up the transition to an inclusive information society. Some suggestions included:
1. Encouraging the use of IST tools such as distance learning and distance learning to bridge the geographical gaps between education providers, employers and the workforce
2. Advertising full employment as an objective of European policy, preferably supported by setting specific targets (eg 6% unemployment by 2005 and full employment by 2010)
3. Consideration should be given to substituting a basic right to work to the basic right for a minimum income in the European Charter
4. Consideration should also be given to formulating a basic right to life-long learning, perhaps supported by specific targets (eg 4 weeks study leave per year)
5. Prioritising the harmonisation of living and working conditions as a goal of employment policy within the framework of the Social Dialogue
6. Adopting measures to ensure the full inclusion of older workers, women workers and people with disabilities into the labour market and more specifically into the knowledge-based sectors of the economy
7. The adoption of specific educational targets throughout the EU, with a particular focus on those regions which currently exhibit a skills deficit
8. The development of strategies to encourage closer cooperation between employers and educational institutes to ensure:
A balance between on-the-job practical and tacit learning with more formal accredited learning. In some countries this may involve adaptations to educational delivery practices, curricula and accreditation systems. It may also involve developing new models of co-operation between employers and education providers
The investigation of mechanisms to speed up the response of educational institutions to changes in the labour markets
Increased attention to the development of teaching and learning methods for 'soft' skills
Learning packages which enable workers to move flexibly between employment and education in order to update their skills and knowledge continuously throughout their adult lives, including courses developed on the sandwich model
The development of special courses aimed at the integration of excluded groups such as the functionally illiterate, unskilled manual workers and older workers into the labour market
The provision of technical and learning support on-line so that workers can access them on demand
School curricula should be made more attractive to encourage students to enter IT professions Attention should, however be paid to ensuring what is good in our institutional traditions should be retained and we avoid 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater' and inadvertently losing quality. Adaptation rather than complete revolution should be the aim.
9. Improvement in data sources and classification systems to enable the new forms of work to be tracked at sectoral and occupational levels. In particular closer collaboration should be encouraged between scientific institutes and official statistics offices to enable the analysis of microdata. Comparability between national data sets should be encouraged
10. The development of mechanisms to speed up flows on the European labour market, including the potential role of temporary work agencies in the transition process
11. Measures should be taken to ensure that self-employed workers and other 'free agents' are not discriminated against in the labour market but are recognised as diffusers and creative sources of new ideas, new ways of working and new enterprises
12. Attention to be paid to intellectual property issues to ensure that models derived from manufacturing industry are not inappropriately applied to the knowledge industries
13. Thought should be given to the relationship between on the one hand the migration of people from developing countries to jobs within the EU and on the other the outsourcing of work from the EU to these countries. If possible strategies should be aimed at encouraging a virtuous cycle of growth in developing countries thus simultaneously developing the standard of living of their people and expanding markets for European goods and services
(Publié le 23 mars 2000)