SkillUp · Skill development and firm upgrading to sustain the competitiveness of the EU manufacturing sector
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2015-09-18 → 2017-09-17
- EU contribution
- €183,455
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Skill development and firm upgrading to sustain the competitiveness of the EU manufacturing sector
In the last decades, European manufacturing industries have gone through intense change. New trends of automation and data exchange in manufacturing (defined as Industry 4.0) are changing the scenario of this sector. Indeed, technological change not only heavily affected the stock of workers employed in manufacturing but, more importantly, impacted on the nature of skill demanded. Technological change might threaten jobs and livelihood in some places if skills are not upgraded to match the new tasks and requirements. However, at the same time, emerging technologies can also offer opportunities to upgrade regional human capital stocks to pursue a balanced industrial development. Manufacturing has also experienced significant transformation as a result of globalisation: it has been the subject of an intense international reorganisation driven crucially by firms’ offshoring strategies. The hollowing out of manufacturing activities is eroding the skill base. This has raised concerns over a mismatch between firms’ skill needs and a persistent skill shortage caused by inadequate training and skilling responsiveness. These phenomena set new challenges that need to be addressed through effective collaborations bringing together the education system, the government and companies. These issues are of huge public and policy interest, and have multiple beneficiaries outside of academia, including in central government, local government, industry and citizens. Indeed, upskilling the labour force in key manufacturing industries must be a game-changer for Europe. It allows central government and local government to define effective workforce skill development in order to enhance the competitiveness of EU manufacturing and service sectors. It impacts on companies’ training strategies and affects citizens’ choices in terms of education/career choices. SkillUp has addressed three of five targets set in EU2020, namely, employment, R&D and education. More specifically, the overall aim of SkillUp has been to provide evidence that the competitiveness of EU manufacturing industries rests on firms’ upgrading strategies coupled with workforce skill development via training and education. SkillUp has highlighted: 1) which skills are needed for the jobs of today and tomorrow; 2) what types of workers can lead to higher regional economic performance; and 3) what effective education and training programmes manufacturing companies should put in place to match the skill set needed in Industry 4.0.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
In the last decades, European manufacturing has been the object of an intense reorganisation driven crucially by multinational firms’ offshoring strategies that have led to the emergence of global production networks. European companies have mainly devoted their efforts to presiding over high value-added upstream and downstream activities whilst offshoring low value-added operations to low labour cost economies. The hollowing out of manufacturing activities is impacting on the EU labour market: it affects the demand of jobs in the EU, and the local and regional stock of competences, raising concerns over a mismatch between firms’ skill needs and persistent skill shortages. The aim of SkillUp is to explore routes that combine firms’ upgrading strategies with workforce skill development in order to enhance the competitiveness of EU manufacturing industries. SkillUp focuses on: 1) which skills are needed for the jobs of today and tomorrow: in which industries? in which regions? 2) are these skills available and where can they be found? and 3) how should such skills be created and what training/education needs to be put in place for this be achieved? Long term European socio-economic growth rests of maintaining a competitive manufacturing sector necessarily in high value added industries, and SkillUp will identify the appropriate sets of skills needed to meet firms’ demand and enhance EU manufacturing competitiveness. The study will use a mixed method research: 1) inferential statistics (t-test) on the EU labour participation using EU Labour Force Survey; 2) a multiple case-study approach by collecting primary through firm-based interviews and secondary data from company reports as well as industry and regional aggregate data from Eurostat and the Labour Force Survey; 3) Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis - Boolean algebra and set theory - will be applied to detect interaction effects amongst firms’ upgrading strategies and workforce skill development.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM · BirminghamCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union