Skills Upgrading

Skills are key to a better job and a better life. Yet acquiring them is often most difficult for the people who need them most: those trapped in low-paid jobs with hard working conditions. Innovative experiments throughout OECD member countries show that barriers to skills acquisition can be overcome. A wide range of actors from government, business and civil society have joined efforts and embarked on initiatives that indeed fill the gap between labour market policy and vocational training, and workers’ weaknesses and employers’ evolving needs. There are rich lessons to be learned from the experiences of Belgium (Flanders), Canada, Denmark, the United Kingdom and the United States, which are investigated in this book.