The COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted economic and social life across Europe and the wider world. Currently, the European Commission is heavily investing in recovery and resilience facilities to encourage economic and social reforms in Member States. As part of the European Semester, the Commission formulates annual Country-Specific…

A central objective of schooling processes at the international level is reading skills development. Unfortunately, many students in the European Union underperform at this, and these low performances can be more pronounced in countries with lower Human Development Index (HDI) values. This study analysed the contextual effect of school…

This article explores cross-country patterns in how conditions relating to family background, education, and the labor market are related to literacy and numeracy skills. It seeks to assess whether these patterns are in agreement with models of skills formation as identified in the political economy literature. The novelty of this article resides…

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused one of the worst economic crises since the Great Depression. Although countries responded quickly to support displaced workers with assistance packages and funding for education and training, additional measures might be needed. Each country's economic recovery will most likely depend on how well its workforce is…

Contemporary learning and development models have identified parkour-style training as a vehicle for athlete enrichment. However, perceptions of team-sport coaches and their receptiveness to such models of athlete enrichment have not been investigated and remain unclear. To explore how parkour-style training could be integrated into athlete…

"Public-Private Partnerships for Skills Development" discusses the concept of public-private partnership (PPP) and its application in the domain of skills development. Volume I proposes a three-dimension typology of PPPs for skills development, and identifies common elements and governance characteristics of these PPPs. Volume II…

To ensure that young people and adults acquire the skills they need to render them employable, vocational education and training systems around the world construct various forms of collaboration between the public and private sectors. Public-private partnerships that focus on skills development are one form of collaboration in the provision of…

Poor literacy skills can result in exclusion and reduce people's capacity to participate in political, social, cultural and economic life. This is important for migrants, refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) who seek to live and work in a dignified, safe and fair environment and to be engaged members of their new communities. The…

The combination of work and study has been hailed as crucial to ensure that youth develop the skills required on the labour market so that transitions from school to work are shorter and smoother. This paper fills an important gap in availability of internationally-comparable data. Using the 2012 Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), it draws a…

Empirical evidence suggests that educational attainment nurtures people's social outcomes and promotes active participation in society and stability. However, it is unclear to what extent other types of human capital also correlate with social outcomes. Hence, we explored the opportunity offered by the PIAAC survey through its provision of…

This paper looks at the importance of mechanisms that give formal recognition to vocational skills acquired through work-based learning and how such mechanisms might be developed. It describes how skill recognition can benefit individuals, employers and society as a whole, and identifies in which contexts skill recognition has the highest…

In this paper, I argue for more and better learning metrics in higher education, eventually through an international, comparative assessment of students' learning outcomes. Better learning measures may help to improve transparency in the system by addressing the information asymmetry problem. If not addressed adequately, the lack of transparency…

The Commission on International Adult Education (CIAE) of the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education (AAACE) provides a forum for the discussion of international issues related to adult education in general, as well as adult education in various countries around the globe. These papers are from the CIAE 2020 Virtual International…

The article focuses on some findings of a comparative study carried out by a network of scholars and researchers who are active in the field of intercultural education in the European context in the main "old immigration countries" (United Kingdom, France and Germany), "new immigration countries" (Italy, Spain and Greece) and…

Improvements in workforce skills are essential for European countries to attain higher economic growth and to compete effectively on product markets. Literature indicates a positive relationship between levels of education and productivity growth. This report builds on and expands this body of research in two ways: (1) It investigates the…