IER News & blogs

The workshop on ‘Forecasting skill supply and demand in Europe: discussing and validating 2011 results’ will be organised by CEDEFOP and IER is to be held in Athens, Greece (6-7 October). The 11th technical workshop on European skills forecasting will include experts from Skillsnet, Cedefop’s international network. The Skillsnet network are a group of researchers and experts active in early identification of skill needs and forecasting or in the transfer of research results on future skill requirements into policy and practice. The aim of this workshop is to present an overview of how the improvements made in 2010 have been built in the general modelling framework and to discuss and validate in detail the results of new skills demand and supply forecast.

As part of an FP7 funded project, MATURE, Professor Alan Brown, Professor Jenny Bimrose and Dr Sally-Anne are organising a workshop on 29 September to demonstrate ICT systems to support careers practitioners. Since 2008, the Warwick Institute for Employment Research has been working with European colleagues developing demonstrator systems. Four systems will be demonstrated: the first has been designed to support practitioners with their use of labour market information (LMI) in careers practice; the second to support practitioners (and more broadly, employees across organisations) with their continuing professional development; the third to visualise LMI data; and finally, LMI learning and development modules.

This invitation only event, taking place at the University of Warwick on 29 September 2011, will focus on an international comparison of approaches to labour market assessment and skills forecasting, with inputs from those with hands-on experience, and who can speak authoritatively (and critically) about the strengths and weakness of the various approaches adopted across the world, and the lessons they have learned over the past 20 years.

Dr Tony Meagher (Centre of Policy Studies, Monash University) and Dr Chandra Shah (Centre for the Economics of Education and Training, Monash University) are visiting IER during week commencing 26 September. Dr Meagher and Dr Shah will attend the Warwick International Symposium on Employment and Skills Forecasting on Thursday 29 September, organised by Professor Rob Wilson. Rob recently visited Monash as part of a collaborative research project being undertaken jointly with Tony Meagher on Anticipating Future Skill Needs, funded by the Monash-Warwick Strategic Funding Initiative. Dr Meagher will be presenting a paper during the Evaluation and Assessment session of the Symposium on “Assessing the reliability of labour market forecasts”.

Bernard Casey will be presenting at NIESR (27 September) on working past retirement age.