The labour market is constantly evolving. Skills, competences, and qualifications that people need change over time, and more rapidly now than in the past.

It is important from the political perspective to better identify and manage the availability of required skills, competences, and qualifications, and to help preventing skills gaps and mismatches in the labour market.

Labour mobility also contributes to making it easier to fill labour shortages, whether cyclical and structural or temporary, and at the same time it offers people opportunities for upward economic and social mobility, as well as being a basic right of European Union's citizens.

From the policy perspective, the Commission supports:

Regarding LABOUR MOBILITY

• Removing the remaining obstacles to free movement of workers
• Labour mobility and cross-border matching of jobseekers and job vacancies
• The Member States in tackling the economic and social challenges resulting from EU labour mobility

Regarding LABOUR SKILLS (in the context of the New Skills for New Jobs initiative)

• Promote better anticipation of future skills needs
• Develop better matching between skills and labour market needs
• Bridge the gap between the worlds of education and work

From the statistical perspective, both labour mobility and labour skills are complex and challenging topics, cutting across a number of statistical domains.

Since these areas of work are relatively new and not yet standardised there is a lack of harmonization of terms and concepts and a clear need for a comprehensive framework to better cover the scope of labour mobility on one hand and labour skills on the other hand. Therefore, stocktaking exercises are being undertaken with the objective of defining roadmaps for data improvement in these areas. Methodological papers dealing with these topics may also be produced.

The main aim of the project is to develop, produce and disseminate online new or improved indicators and explanatory pages that will support integrated analyses on skills, vocational training and lifelong learning of the working age population on one hand, and labour mobility on the other.