Link4Skills (Link4Skills)

The project combines quantitative and qualitative methodologies to assess skill gaps and skill matching in the EU labour markets.  IIASA is contributing a quantitative modelling work package providing a forecast of the EU’s labour supply and skill shortage scenarios. Dedicated work packages investigate emerging and established migration skill corridors between the EU and selected countries such as India, Morocco, Ghana, Nigeria, Philippines, Indonesia, and Ukraine, to make enriched inventories of skill partnerships. The project achieves its aims via demographic microsimulations, combining skill supply and demand data and trends, and by data collections and stakeholders’ expertise overseas. The knowledge will be nested in the AI-Assisted Skill Navigator (TRL5) which is a Knowledge-Based Expert System, that goes beyond existing policy dashboards. It is an open-access system available to the public. It is co-created by labour market stakeholders in every partner country. Partners will take care of stakeholders’ involvement in the project, by enhancing tailor-made communication and dissemination. The project will also produce Link4Skills Podcast Series and academic outlets.

The research team at IIASA leads the work package (WP2) "Skill Shortage Model & Matching Needs in Changing Labour Markets". This WP will deliver data and knowledge that enhance the understanding of future labour force and skill shortages in EU27 countries at the national level utilizing MDM’s expertise in dynamic microsimulation modelling and projecting future labour force (Marois et al. 2023, Marois et al. 2019). The microsimulation model for EU countries will be extended to go beyond formal educational attainment to project future labour supply and its skills in the EU. To complement the modeling of labour force skills in destinations, the assessment of skills in origin countries will be enabled through a unique dataset of skill-adjusted human capital stocks, building on the previous work of Claudia Reiter and colleagues on skill-adjusted global human capital (Reiter et al. 2020). We will evaluate skill gaps and matching in the EU with analyses of human capital in origins. Scenario-based projections will focus on activation, upskilling and migration as alternatives for tackling skills shortages. Scenario results will provide quantitative assessments of the impacts of the outcomes and limits of each of these policy tools against automation as an alternative. The team will also contribute to the discussion on the potential impact of established and new/emerging skill corridors on skill shortages (WP4) and will be involved in the design and implementation of the Link4Skills AI-Assisted Skill Navigator (WP5) and dissemination of the project results.