A meeting with a wide range of Greek stakeholders was organised by the Greek Ministry of Labour in cooperation with Cedefop in Athens on 29 November.
The purpose of the event was to:
- Raise awareness among stakeholders on the importance of skills anticipation activities and the use of its outcomes for evidence-based policy-making in Greece and the EU;
- Provide information on Cedefop’s ongoing project ‘Governance of EU skills anticipation and matching: in-depth country review’ that is supporting several EU Member States (such as Bulgaria, Estonia, Slovakia, Greece, Malta and Iceland) to improve the governance of their skills anticipation and matching systems;
- Provide information on the first outcomes of the review for Greece and request stakeholders’ support for the next steps.
Stakeholders from various Greek Ministries, the Bank of Greece, social partners (SEV, GSEBEE, GSEE), universities and other public and private actors attended the meeting and were familiarised with the first findings of the Cedefop project as well as with ongoing efforts to build a mature Greek skills anticipation system.
Cedefop Head of Department for Skills and Labour Market Pascaline Descy welcomed the participants and explained that ‘the EU policy context has gradually responded in recent years to the call by countries for more in-depth support by EU institutions. Cedefop has responded to this need by putting together a cross-country support programme aimed at facilitating improvement of countries’ skills anticipation and matching methods and tools and, crucially, of their underlying governance processes.’
A representative of the Ministry of Labour stressed the commitment of the Greek authorities to the programme, stressing that its findings will ‘be a significant input towards the optimal use of the results of the newly developed Greek Mechanism of Labour Market Diagnosis.’
Cedefop expert Konstantinos Pouliakas, one of the programme coordinators, presented the new analytical framework for analysing the governance of skills anticipation and matching systems in countries, developed during the first phase. He noted that ‘the new Cedefop programme ensures that national stakeholders are at the driving seat – they set their priorities and take ownership of the project’s findings.’
Mr Pouliakas said that Cedefop provides a helping hand by collecting in-depth evidence from a wide network of stakeholders seeking to strike consensus on the bottlenecks in the processes: ‘We seek to spot any roadblocks and then to provide fertile ground so that the wider national stakeholders agree on a roadmap of potential policy actions to be pursued in the medium term.’
Cedefop expert Ilias Livanos also emphasised the multiple benefits of carrying out skills anticipation exercises in countries: ‘We focus on skills anticipation not because of an infatuation with identifying exact numbers of professions in demand, or to convince people to pursue new upcoming “catchy” specialities. We do so because setting the right foundations for a skills anticipation and matching system is an organic and healthy process that ensures responsive feedback between vocational education and training and the labour market’.
A representative of the Greek National Institute of Labour and Human Resources also showcased the remarkable progress made as part of the development of a Greek Mechanism of Labour Market Diagnosis and invited participants to try the newly developed online platform.
