The skills dimension of migration

The European Union works to ensure that migration takes place in a safe, regular and sustainable manner. Indeed, its New Pact on Migration and Asylum proposes to strengthen and deepen comprehensive, tailor-made and mutually beneficial partnerships with key countries of origin and transit. To improve cooperation with key partner countries and facilitate legal migration to the EU and mutually beneficial mobility, the Commission is launching Talent Partnerships (first in the EU’s neighbourhood region, the Western Balkans, and in Africa).

The EU’s aim is not to encourage migration or to attract only high-skilled migrants to the detriment of sending countries by contributing to brain-drain. Rather, the objectives are to provide support at a systemic level whereby migrants are able to use and develop their skills for and through gainful employment. This is particularly important in new and emerging sectors in the context of the digital and green transition where specific skillsets are required without which they could be excluded. Read this month article on the EU's Strategy for the Danube Region Strategy for a unique example on how this is being done.

Enhancing migrants' potential and labour market participation contributes to economic development and recovery of the host country and potentially the country of origin either through remittances or where returning migrants can apply newly acquired skills and experience gained abroad. Indeed, next year will be the European Year of Skills and developing those of migrants is a top priority.

The EU’s Talent Partnerships are also intended to support the wider building of skills intelligence around concerned migration countries, labour market development, enhancement of the vocational education and training sector, integration of returning migrants. and strengthening of the diaspora network.

Within the remit of the EU's external relations and its role as a global actor the ETF works to build an integrated system to harmonise and link skills recognition systems between the EU and partner countries in the EU’s neighbouring regions and within countries themselves.

This building of skills intelligence informs the policy advice which the ETF gives to partner countries and shares with EU institutions and Member States, and more broadly with other international organisations as part of the United Nation Network on Migration in the pursuit of migration policy goals supporting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The ETF partners include the International Organization for Migration (IOM), UNESCO, UNHCR and the International Labour Organization with which an e-learning course on the skills dimensions of labour migration to policy makers and practitioners was jointly delivered earlier this year.

Studies and reports produced by the ETF focus on the triangular relationship between migration, human capital formation, and labour markets as in "Use it or lose it!" the ETF's in depth report, featured below, that explores the situation between the EU and the Western Balkans based on research and analysis carried out in the Western Balkan countries in 2020–21. Individual reports are also available (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia and the Western Balkans). Additionally, as part of the human capital development systems’ assessment, policy responses and good practices related to the skills dimensions of migration were explored in a number of ETF partner countries in the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean and Eastern Europe in 2021 (Georgia, Jordan, Lebanon, Moldova, Morocco, Tunisia and Ukraine). 

More specifically, the ETF works with countries in the EU neighbourhood to support the necessary skills requisites for migrants including the recognition of qualifications, validation of skills and competencies and prior learning by sharing EU tools such as the European Qualifications Framework (EQF), the New Europass​ and the EU Skills Profile Tool​. Moreover, the ETF has been building skills profiles of migrants within partner countries and across partner countries to improve policies for skills development mechanisms in countries of origin.

The ETF has also recently produced a comparison report (soon to be published) of the Ukrainian Qualifications Framework and the European Qualifications Framework (EQF) to facilitate the integration of Ukrainian refugees in Europe. This report feeds into the ETF’s initiative to create a network of national qualifications databases that exchange information on qualifications and 'speak' to each other which is the focus of a subsequent article in this edition of Learning Connects.