Over recent years, jobs based routine cognitive tasks have been prime candidates for computerisation and outsourcing – mirroring earlier declines in the demand for manual skills. Conversely, recent trends show sharp increases in the demand for complex communication skills and non-routine analytical skills. These trends pose a major challenge for education systems: the skills that are easiest to teach and test are the ones that are most rapidly disappearing from the labour markets of advanced economies.

• How are governments anticipating the demand for skills, how do they establish effective ways to communicate the demand for new skills from those who use them to those who produce them, and how do they translate this into the design of effective learning organisations and instructional methods?
• What education and training policies have been introduced or are being considered to ensure quality and efficiency in learning provision and equity in access to learning opportunities, how are governments building coalitions with the business sector and social investors to resource the rising demand for better skills and how are they establishing sustainable approaches to who should pay for what, when, where and how much?
• How could an international skills strategy contribute most effectively to national policy development? How can the OECD provide support to national skill strategies?

Background reading

• Issues Paper 2: Matching skills to emerging needs
• Learning for Jobs – OECD Policy Reviews of Vocational Education and Training (VET)
  .....  Initial report
  .....  Pointers
• Markets in Education
• Innovation Strategy for Education and Training