It would be a match made in heaven: the OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills (known officially as the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, PIAAC) and the European Commission’s ESCO project (a multilingual classification of European Skills, Competences, Qualifications, and Occupations). Together, they would create an invaluable map of the supply and demand for professional skills across countries.
Sunny days and tight labor markets have something in common: they don’t trigger an urge to repair anything. But just as a sunny day is better for fixing the roof, instead of climbing on slippery slates during a downpour, tight-labor periods are good for preparing for more turbulent times ahead. And turbulence is definitely coming to a labor market near you.
Losing one‘s job is one of the more severe psychological blows one can experience, similar in magnitude to a divorce. But while a divorce might actually improve your marriage skills for the next time around, especially because the skills needed remain practically identical, in a job-loss situation the skills used previously can become degraded or obsolete, in particular if the jobless period drags on, resulting over time in a skill mismatch with what the labor market requires.
Until just a few decades back you could count on the education you got in college seeing you all the way to retirement. Now, you have to reinvent yourself professionally several times during your working life just to stay current. Lifelong learning is the name of the game, and training and re-skilling the tools of choice.