With the official launch of the Union of Skills during the European Employment and Social Rights Forum, the EU sought to send a strong message: Europe’s competitiveness is rooted in skills development. The need to reskill and upskill the adult population is not only the legacy of the European Year of Skills, but it has been retained as a key programmatic issue in the Political guidelines for the European Commission 2024-2029. Essentially, the Union of Skills promises to be our collective reference when it comes to education and training in Europe, a large umbrella under which EU efforts will find a common direction. 

What changes for adult learning and education, in practice?

Three objectives

The Union of Skills Communication sets out three main objectives:

• Empowering people to build solid skills foundations and engage in lifelong upskilling and reskilling. This is based on a vision of equity, ensuring all can access the learning they need, and it is also clearly specified that this is not only limited to technical skills, but also to transversal competences.
• Making companies competitive. This includes a call for constant upskilling and reskilling of all workers, in a shared responsibility. 
• Making skills and qualifications transparent and trusted. The focus of this objective is mainly ensuring that individuals can make use of their right to free movement and that employers can recruit these individuals across borders. 

Four pillars

Build skills for quality jobs and lives

This pillar aims to address the increasing numbers of learners who miss basic skills, while combatting inequity in learning. Namely, it has been identified that socio-economic background, gender, and geography (urban vs rural) lead to significant discrepancies in achievement between advantaged and disadvantaged learners.

Upskill and reskill the workforce

The second pillar links more clearly skills development with competitiveness. The joint responsibility of public authorities at EU, national, regional and local levels, businesses, social partners, education and training providers, civil society organisations, local communities, and individuals is made clear. The low levels of adult participation in learning (below 40%) are highlighted, and then linked with low motivation.

Circulate skills

As barriers continue to hinder the seamless portability and recognition of people’ skills and qualifications, the UoS will explore facilitating the validation of skills and recognition of qualifications to ensure balanced cross-border mobility and free movement of knowledge and skills. 

Attract, develop and retain talent

Based on the existing demographic trends in Europe, the working-age population is bound to shrink annually by 1 million workers until 2050. Therefore, UoS will also focus on making Europe an attractive destination for talent, from a retention perspective but also from the perspective of migration. 

What to expect?

Concretely, we can stay on the lookout for a plethora of initiatives already in 2025. The Commission already announced a Basic Skills Action Plan and a STEM Education Strategic Plan. Between the end of the year and the beginning of 2026 we can expect a few more initiatives to see the light: a 2030 Roadmap on the future of digital education and skills, an EU Teachers and Trainers Agenda, a European competence framework for academic staff (ResearchComp), an EU Strategy for VET and many more!

Read more on the Union of Skills here.