Trying to bridge the gap between education, training and employment is one of the fundamental objectives of the agenda for new skills and jobs submitted by the European Commission on 23 November. While some 23 million citizens are unemployed, employers still express certain difficulties in recruiting. For that reason, the Agenda proposes a set of 13 actions to reform labour markets and improve skills and employability of European workers.

As part of the Europe 2020 Strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth 'An Agenda for New Skills and Jobs' is the Commission's contribution to reaching the EU employment rate target for women and men of 75% for the 20-64 years age group by 2020. The strategy also highlights the EU's targets to reduce the early school leaving rate to under 10% and increase the number of young people in higher education or equivalent vocational education to at least 40%.

Objectives of Commission's Agenda for New Skills and Jobs

• To give people and businesses the right incentives to invest in training to continuously upgrade people's skills in line with labour market needs.
• To ensure decent working conditions while improving the quality of employment legislation, the Commission will present proposals to review the working Time Directive and propose a legislative initiative for the better implementation of the Posting of Workers directive.
• To ensure the right labour market conditions are in place for job creation which is especially important in fast-moving sectors like R&D-intensive sectors. The agenda will also encourage entrepreneurship, for example by exchanging best practice on entrepreneurship education, and through the Erasmus for Young Entrepreneurs (EYE) programme.
• The Agenda for new skills and jobs complements the Commission's recently launched 'Youth on the Move' initiative, which aims to help young people to gain the knowledge, skills and experience they need to make their first job a reality.

The Commission will also launch an 'EU skills panorama' which will forecast the skills that will be required in future and help to ensure people have the right mix of skills such as ICT and languages, to boost their job prospects and adaptability.

The Agenda puts forward a proposal to develop a shared interface - European Skills, Competences and Occupations classification – to bring together more closely the worlds of employment, education and training. The Commission also calls for reforms to ensure the recognition of professional qualifications and proposes to develop a European Skills Passport that will work alongside with the European CV Europass, to help citizens record their skills in a transparent and comparable way.