Skills mismatch: How to measure and reduce it in the partner countries

‘Skills mismatch is a challenge in most ETF partner countries, it has adverse impact on individuals and whole economies, and results in high youth unemployment and low competitiveness of enterprises,’ said Shawn Mendes, deputy director of the ETF, at the opening of a three day expert conference on anticipation and matching of demand and supply of skills held in Turin, Italy from 29 to 31 October.
ETF project on matching skills
The conference was organised in the context of an ETF project supporting the partner countries in the area of skills matching. The ETF, in cooperation with Cedefop and the International Labour Office (ILO), is producing a number of practice-oriented guides that will help developing and transition countries use various methods of anticipating, forecasting and matching the demand and supply of skills. At the meeting, delegates from Croatia, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Ukraine and several international experts discussed and validated the first drafts and concepts of the methodological guides. 
Why methodological guides?
Timo Kuusela, who leads the project at the ETF, said the idea of the methodological guides came from a research the ETF did in ten of its partner countries.
‘There is data available, different kind of surveys are conducted in these countries, but there is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding on the methodologies and what kind of problems they can address,’ said Mr Kuusela. ‘So, we concluded that it made sense to develop a set of tools for handling the anticipation, forecasting, matching of skills.’
The guides deal with the issues like mid- and long-term forecasting or how to use labour-market information to analyse skills mismatch.
What are skills mismatches?
Skills mismatches are gaps or imbalances of skills, knowledge or competences. When there are skills shortages firms have trouble obtaining workers with the required competences. Skill surpluses, caused by over-education or over-qualification, are waste of valuable human resources.
‘ETF partner countries face continuous uncertainties on the labour market due to large informal sectors, ongoing restructuring of economy, said Mr Mendes. ‘They require new knowledge and intelligence on how to modernise their education and training provision to meet the demand of the labour market.’
The mismatch in ETF partner countries
Sanja Crnković-Pozaić, advisor to the Croatia’s Minister of Labour and Pension System, said her country had large surpluses of skills in certain areas, and at the same time experiences total lack of skills in other areas.
‘Sometimes you have very strange situations, where, for example, in textiles, a declining industry, you don’t have enough people to work, because it has become such an unattractive area and the wages are low, said Ms Crnković-Pozaić.
‘On the other hand, you have areas where you have absolutely too many people, like in economics, especially on vocational education level. These mismatches are particularly evident on the regional level, but on the national level they even out.
Who will benefit from the project?
The methodological guides developed by ETF project are mainly for policymakers, but they may also be useful for employers, who want to analyse their own sectors, and for training providers, who need to follow the demand for training in the expanding sectors.