Employability: Challenges for education and training systems

Abstract

The recent crisis has taken its toll in terms of unemployment, especially among young people. This has revived the debate on the contribution of Education and Training (E&T) systems to the employability of young graduates. At European policy level, there is a growing interest in creating incentives for reforming E&T systems so as to make them more responsive to future labour market needs and short term adverse labour market conditions. One of the main challenges is finding valid measures for evaluating the contribution of E&T systems to employability, taking into account their diversity within the European Union. This paper presents an operational framework of analysis for employability and discusses some of the most important challenges related to the multidimensional nature of the employability concept, the lack of data for cross-country comparison and the difficulty of disentangling the role of education and training systems from other factors in evaluating labour market outcomes. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.