Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-01-18-Speech-2-564-000"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20110118.21.2-564-000"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spoken text |
"Mr President, education is one of the major factors that determines employability. The risk of being unemployed is 40% lower for higher education graduates than for people with only secondary education. However, youth unemployment and under-employment are unacceptably high today. Too many graduates struggle to make the transition to the labour market and secure quality employment that corresponds to their educational background.
Of course, the efforts to improve employability begin well before higher education. The Commission works with Member States to identify the skills or key competences that young people need to learn at school. Today, young people need a wider range of skills than ever before in order to flourish in a globalised economy. Many will work in jobs that do not yet exist. Many will need advanced linguistic, intercultural and entrepreneurial skills. Technology will continue to change the world in ways we cannot imagine, so the ability to continue to learn and to innovate will become crucial factors for employability.
Guidance is also critical. Young people are confronted with an increased number of educational choices. They need to be able to take informed decisions. This requires better information about education and training paths, including a clear picture of job opportunities. We need to develop quality career guidance services and vocational orientation with the strong involvement of labour market institutions.
Turning to higher education, the Commission recently launched, as you know, Youth on the Move – a Europe 2020 flagship initiative which sets out to make education and training more relevant to young people’s needs. We are now starting to implement the various parts of this strategy. Later this year, the Commission plans to present a new Communication on the modernisation of higher education. We will take stock of progress in making higher education more relevant to the needs of the knowledge-based society, including the question of employability. We will identify the key challenges for the future and set out our response.
As part of these efforts, the Commission will reinforce the European platform for dialogue between universities and business, with a view to increasing the employability of students and to developing the role of education in the knowledge triangle. In a more global and mobile world, transparency regarding the performance of higher education institutions can stimulate both competition and cooperation, and be an incentive for further improvements and modernisation. However, existing international rankings can give an incomplete picture of the performance of universities. This year, the Commission will present the results of a feasibility study to develop an alternative multi-dimensional ranking system which reflects the diversity of higher education institutions.
Europe needs to be better at anticipating the skill needs of tomorrow. This is why the Commission has launched the Agenda for New Skills and Jobs, which goes hand in hand with our Youth on the Move initiative. The Agenda for New Skills and Jobs looks at how to help our young people to become more employable. Above all, we need to give people the right mix of skills so that they can adapt to our fast-changing society. Our new EU Skills Panorama, which will be operational in 2012, will help to forecast not only the skills that employers need today, but also those required in the future.
In the spring of this year, the Commission intends to propose new European benchmarks on learning mobility and on the role of education in preparing people to be employable in the knowledge-based labour market.
Finally, EU programmes to support education, training and youth, including mobility programmes such as Erasmus, can help young people to improve their chances in the labour market by gaining valuable international experience and by developing their intellectual understanding."@en1
|
| lpv:unclassifiedMetadata | |
| lpv:videoURI |
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples