The Future of the Skill Structure in Europe

This paper aims to deliver a quantitative description of the two global context scenarios developed in the NEUJOBS FP7 project. These scenarios provide some socio-economic and environmental results up to 2030 in order to reveal the main challenges for the European Union in the framework of the “socio-ecological transition" without policy intervention. The employment and the skill structure evolutions are analyzed more carefully during the study. Regarding these aspects, the scenarios shed light on the important development of employment in services, which is in line with the shift towards the service sectors occurring in the European economy (the process is less rapid than in the last decades however). Insomuch as the services require a high level of skills for their workers, especially the most dynamic ones (business services, consulting services, bank, insurance, etc.), the increase of this kind of activities stimulates the upgrade of the global skill level within the European labor markets. Besides, the growing competition on the European markets (national and international) forces firms to product innovative services and goods (energy efficiency, better quality, personalization, etc.) and then to hire skilled workers. Nevertheless, despite the significant growth of the demand for high-skilled labor, the strong high-skilled labor supply induced by the massification of tertiary education cannot be totally absorbed and brings about a “bottleneck effect”. Furthermore, the employment objectives defined in the “Europe 2020” strategy are not fulfilled.  Overall, these results plead for policies enhancing innovation, research and competitiveness which could facilitate to overcome the labor market difficulties.