Skills-First Readiness and Adoption Index

Skills-first approaches prioritise demonstrated skills over formal qualifications and experience in hiring, training, and workforce development, positioning skills as the core currency for articulating, developing, and recognising capabilities across the labour market. The Skills-First Readiness and Adoption Index is the first structured, data-driven framework to measure and track the readiness and adoption of skills-first practices across countries.

In this homepage, you will find the aggregate results for the Skills-First Readiness and Adoption Index. Explore the tabs above to see how countries fare across the three domains of skills-first readiness and adoption: Learning Ecosystem, Talent Recognition, and Enabling Environment. Check also the complementary Labour Market Pressure for Skills-First Approaches Index, which presents the degree to which a country stands to benefit from improving its skills-first implementation.

The Skills-First Readiness and Adoption Index is a composite measure designed to synthesise the multi-dimensional skills-first concept into a single, interpretable metric. It is composed of three sub-indices (Skills-First Learning Ecosystem, Skills-First Talent Recognition, and Enabling Environment for Skills-First Approaches), encompassing a total of 25 indicators. The indicators reflect policies required to develop individuals’ skills, mechanisms that promote employer recognition of those skills, as well as the broader national and institutional environments that enable both development and recognition. Additionally, the indicators are selected to capture the roles that key stakeholders play in building toward a skills-first mindset: employers, governments, training providers, and individuals themselves. A higher score on any component of the index is associated with greater skills-first readiness and adoption.

A complementary Labour Market Pressure for Skills-First Approaches Index has also been developed. This index comprises a further 9 indicators. It represents the degree to which a country stands to benefit from improving its skills-first policies. Importantly, the Labour Market Pressure Index is not incorporated into the calculation of the main Skills-First Readiness and Adoption Index; rather, it is intended to provide further contextual information for each country, highlighting latent opportunity. A higher score signals stronger labour market pressure and greater potential benefit from timely adoption.

A methodological note describing the construction of the Index and the sources of the underlying data is available here. To request the full dataset, please contact the OECD team at ELSSkills1@oecd.org.