Skills Classification - an International Workshop, Venice 28-29 November 2024

This two-day workshop brings together people working to develop, use, and maintain national skills classifications, with the aim of sharing methods, knowledge about, and experience with their work.

The two-day program, hosted by the University of Warwick in Venice, organised by the Warwick Institute for Employment Research (IER) and funded by the Gatsby Foundation, is designed to facilitate future collaboration between countries as they seek to address the common goal of classifying skills.

The programme shown below will highlight the development work in this area currently underway in the UK, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia and Sweden, together with information and advice from the ILO and the World Bank on skills measurement, and the demand for and use of skills indicators in other countries.

A workshop report will be prepared and circulated to all participants following the event.

The workshop programme

 28^th November 2024

10.00 – 10.10 Welcome address and introductions - (Peter Elias, Warwick IER and Daniel Sandford-Smith, Gatsby Foundation)

10.10 – 10.30 The need for a classification of skills - (Frank Bowley, Skills England, Jonathan Mitchell, Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education)

10.30 – 10.40 Skills classification and the devolved nations of the UK - (Rebecca Cope, National Occupational Standards Governance Group, Northern Ireland)

10.40 – 11.40 Developing the UK Standard Skills Classification - (Neil Bachelor, Jeisson Cardenas-Rubio, and Rosie Day, Warwick IER)

11.40 – 12.40 A Skills Classification for the Netherlands - (Joost Vangenabeek and Wouter Korteling, TNO, Netherlands)

 12.40 – 13.40 Lunch break

13.40 – 14.40 Skills Sweden - (Petter Nygård, Arbetsförmedlingen, Sweden)

14.40 – 15.40 Skills Australia - (Ellie Yates, Jobs and Skills Australia)

 15.40 – 16.00 Break for refreshments

16.00 – 16.30 Round up of discussions on day one

29^th November 2024

09.30 – 10.30 The Canadian experience - (David Hartnett and Laura Sauer, Employment and Social Development Canada)

10.30 – 11.00 Coffee break

11.00 – 12.00 The World Bank, the ILO and skills measurement - (Eliana Carranza, World Bank and Taka Kizu, ILO)

12.00 – 12.30 Lunch break

12.30 – 13.15 Engaging with users - (all participants)

13.15 - 14.00 Updating and maintaining skills classifications - (all participants)

14.00 – 14.30 Future collaboration plans - (all participants)

Workshop Themes

There are four major themes the workshop will be structured around cover. Each is outlined below, together with some examples of the issues that might fall under each of these themes.

Theme 1 - Methods for the development of skills classifications 

• Sources of information on skill specification
• Identifying future skills
• Pooling information from disparate sources
• Defining and measuring core skills
• Use of AI tools to identify, standardise, and label skill descriptions
• Access platforms for different user groups
• Establishing aggregated skill categories
• Linking to related classifications (e.g. occupations, education and training)

Theme 2 - Validation of skills classifications 

• Construct, content, uniqueness, and consistency validation
• Face validity
• Sources of information for validation purposes

 Theme 3 - Developing engagement strategies with stakeholders 

• Identifying and engaging different stakeholder and user groups
• Types of engagement (passive versus active)
• Developing and promoting use cases with stakeholders

 Theme 4 -Maintaining and updating a skills classification

• Resource requirements for maintenance
• Maintenance and updating methods (sources of information, frequency, continuity)
• Identifying emerging and future skills
• Frequency of maintenance