IFSI Seminar # 4 Recap: Skills Intelligence Innovators and Impact Makers

Our latest IFSI webinar began with a clear premise: what Skills Intelligence innovations with impact can be scaled and transferred to other contexts?

Carme Pagès set out with the mission of UPAL by describing the shift from degrees and job titles toward what skills people can demonstrably do. Michele Tuccio (OECD) then went deep into OECD´s Skills First R&D work. He argued that much of what passes for skills intelligence is really occupational or sectoral forecasting, and much of the rest of Skills Intelligence often remains unused by intended audiences. He pointed to a couple of illustrative cases, including France’s regional green-transition mapping and Singapore’s public dashboards where skills analysis is granular and has been shown to actually reach employers, learners and providers.

Yustina Saleh (Burning Glass Institute) presented the view of Burning Glass and their work, including the pressing challenge of aligning education to a labour market in flux, where yesterday’s technical skills are becoming today’s foundations and where many of the most valuable skills have an ever shorter shelf life. When asked  ¨what are some minimum entry points where institutions can begin skills first approaches without a massive capital investment that may be required? Yustina´s answer was clear: skills first approaches and skills intelligence is an infrastructure investment, and and no single institution can carry it alone, linking back to the idea that this work requires broader ecosystem work between different actors (Universities/Academia, Industry/Employers, Public Administration and Civil Society). The university, for example, should be a clear node for Skills Intelligence work, capable of supporting high quality, relevant and agile lifelong learning for diverse students.

To close, Sorcha Carthy (Higher Education Authority) presented the impressive Irish policy architecture that makes Skills intelligence infrastructure possible (i.e. when a country commits to it). Ireland’s €300m Human Capital Initiative combined multi-annual funding with enterprise partners embedded from the beginning, and it was able to reach 106,000 learners through new courses and microcredentials. The rest of Europe and the world should be paying attention to these initiatives and the policy architecture and skills intelligence infrastructure that has been developed here.

In this seminar, clear examples of how to build flexible, stackable provision which respond to labour market and broader societal needs were presented, offering some potential roadmaps to follow across different cases (France, Singapore, Ireland, U.S.A. and Spain). As Natalia Basilico said in her closing, the promise of a skills first approach, based in Skills Intelligence, is in building a common language and bridge between education and work. As we know at UPAL, this work is easier said than done, and requires continous learning, capacity development and improvement along the way. However, this is the mission of IFSI, so we hope to see you in November.