The Fourth Forum Meeting ‘Partnerships for Skills and Competitiveness, Vienna, Austria on 18 – 19 February 2008
Local labour markets have particular skills needs, and local stakeholders are increasingly developing specific local skills strategies to address them. Skills provide a particularly useful ‘hook’ on which to hang a number of local strategic objectives surrounding competitiveness, enterprise and inclusion. However preparing a skills strategy can be difficult. A large number of different policy areas touch on the skills agenda: education, vocational training, employment, entrepreneurship, regional development, and community development. Harnessing the buy-in of policy makers in these areas, achieving agreement on clear targets and following this through to concrete implementation can be a significant challenge.
The Fourth Forum Meeting seeked to identify the best ways for partnerships to contribute to the design and implementation of skills development strategies which can boost competitiveness and make the economy more inclusive. More than 130 partnership practitioners, managers, national co-ordinators of partnership networks, and policy makers from OECD Member and non-member countries joined fruitful debates.
Long abstract
