Achieving an enhanced Mid-Life Skills Review, Supporting Older Workers to Plan, Progress and Prosper in Later Life
Europe is currently facing a demographic crisis, with a shrinking workforce coupled with increased demands for social services. The labour force in Europe is projected to decrease by an average of two million every year between 2010 and 2030. This represents a loss of 1% of its current size per year for 20 years. Yet, in many countries, most workers still retire (relatively) early. They often do so not because they want to, but because they feel compelled to (or) that they do not have other options.
Solutions need to be found to make work more sustainable, and to extend working lives in order to avoid old-age poverty and to reduce state expenditure on pensions and welfare.
Recent OECD research has highlighted that there are many millions of adults in Europe with low levels of functional literacy and/or numeracy skills and that the majority of these are in employment. This has negative implications for their employment potential and longer-term career prospects. The concept of the Mid Life Skills Review (MLSR) is one which is gradually gaining favour in many countries and the role of social partners in both lobbying for and delivering elements of this is one that could be critical to its success.
The European Mid-Life Skills Review Project
Our project will develop a suite of new materials to support the delivery of a Mid Life Skills Review – by enhancing the much used Value My Skills Tool developed by the MLSR ERASMUS+ Project that was successfully launched in 2019.
The potential benefits of these new materials emerged from the evaluation of the MLSR project and include new Quick Win learning materials that will enable learners to boost their skills quickly helping them get back into learning.
In addition we will build new coaching support materials, new national delivery models to drive uptake and mainstreaming and a brand new innovation - an Occupation Guide Function that will link the emerging learner's skills with the ESCO classification system enabling the learner to link their existing skills to potential occupations and to see where skills boosts (via the Quick Wins for example) could lead to routes into other occupations.
The VMS Tool uses workplace coaches/reviewers to work through the Tool with the learners/reviewees. The coaches across the partnership will be encouraged to become ‘mid-life skills champions, with the support of online tools and a virtual e-network. This network will support its members and share ideas and experience.
As well as a new suites of materials and in keeping with the European priority for prioritising the recognition of skills and qualifications, we will accredit learning through a new online digital badge and explore linking this into the Europass CV Programme. Badging of this kind is increasingly valued and is an innovation which the lead partner has some existing expertise in using.
We will gain further sustainable impacts by: delivering a series of events in each partner country to highlight the new materials and support available; we will highlight through social media the positive outcomes from the mid-life skills reviews e.g. progression, promotion, career change etc; and building on or utilising existing learner tracking systems to carry out a longitudinal study of the impact of mid-life skills reviews (going beyond the length of the project) which will focus on 3 key perspectives: workplaces/reviewers/employees.
The partners have been selected as all have existing close working relationships with employers, policymakers and trade unions and all have significant experience in working in the adult education and skills sector and have the skills to carry out all of the activities required within the project.
Our Outputs
We plan to create three new Intellectual Outputs to accompany the VMS Tool
1. New Coaching Materials
A new suite of online materials, developed to support these innovative coaching roles. The VMS Tool is itself innovative and is proving popular as it combines traditional skills assessment with a gamified format that is easy to use and easy to understand and translate across different settings and users. Targeting older workers within the labour market with low skills levels remains unusual for projects and mainstream delivery and we believe developing and growing the use of the VMS Tool is in itself an innovation. To accompany this we will produce a new Delivery Model for each country to help with targeting the new materials in the right way. Further we will embed this within a new conceptual European Framework to guide future delivery.
You can use the tool on your own or consider having a Union Learning Rep to guide you and discuss your findings with. Find out more about Value My Skills.
2. Occupation Matching Function
This work would match the skills and competences identified through the use of the VMS Tool and link these to potential occupational groupings (in ESCO). This adds a new dimension to the use of the VMS Tool enabling users to see potential career progression within their existing field or within others. Users will see how their skills link to jobs.
3. Building new Quick Win learning materials and Piloting all of the above
We plan to develop a series of short byte-sized courses, lasting no more than 10 minutes (and typically 2-5), in all partner languages, that learners can move straight onto when completing their assessment. We have included materials developer Saffron specifically to build these materials (and the associated IO2 materials). These will then be extensively piloted alongside the existing VMS Tool.
A particular focus for Piloting will be:
- the 9%-15% of working people in Europe in 'arduous' jobs - which are jobs that can be defines as 'intense, dangerous and unhealthy or unsustainable'.
- those people with a need for better 'basic skills', namely mathematics, literacy and digital/ICT which are increasingly needed for almost all jobs in the labour market including many previously requiring no qualifications.
We are then planning a series of 5 conferences to help with our dissemination.
Our International Partners
This is an international Adult Education project funded through the ERASMUS+ Programme and the following are all partners in the work:
The Mid-Life Skills Review Project is funded with the support of the European Union’s ERASMUS+ Programme. All views expressed are those of the authors and not of the European Commission.
The European Commission support for the production of these publications does not constitute an endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.