Barcelona will host a conference on "New skills and new jobs for a more competitive Europe" as part of the Spanish Presidency of the EU. It will be chaired by the Spanish Minister of Employment and Inmigration, Celestino Corbacho.

The European Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion, László Andor, and the European commisioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth, Androulla Vassiliou, will preside over the opening of the conference on ‘New skills and new jobs for a more competitive Europe’, which is taking place in Barcelona on 8 and 9 April as part of the Spanish Presidency of the EU.

The meeting brings together ministers and senior European officials, experts in the field and representatives of the European social partners (Business Europe and the European Trade Union Confederation), and it will take place in the Hotel Juan Carlos I of Barcelona.

The aim of the conference is to present and discuss the the European Commission's proposal “New skills for new jobs”. A conference on the same issue took place in Brussels last february. 

The Spanish Presidency has signalled that it will take special care to develop this initiative, which constitutes one of the basic pillars of the new 2010 post-Lisbon Strategy in the field of employment and of the EU's response to the current economic crisis.

After some years of relatively high growth and job creation (8 million new jobs alone in 2006-2008), the economic crisis has hit labour markets in Europe and affected the prospects and livelihoods of Europeans. In response, the European Commission launched a recovery plan to tackle the effects of the crisis and set three priorities for safeguarding jobs. One of them is upgrading and maintaining the level of skills in Europe.