Task force seeks to promote a European employment market

Citation

(2002), "Task force seeks to promote a European employment market", Journal of European Industrial Training, Vol. 26 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/jeit.2002.00326eab.003

Task force seeks to promote a European employment market

Task force seeks to promote a European employment market

Too many obstacles still exist to proper mobility of labour in the EU, says a high-level task force which is investigating the issue.

The task force recommends that more companies should take part in lifelong education and training, and that there should be more regular exchanges of best practice at European level. European prizes could be set up for companies with the best lifelong education and training strategies.

Basic skills should cover reading, writing, arithmetic and information technology. More effort should be made to interest women in information and communication technology.

Professional-qualification systems should be revised by 2005, to make it easier for skills and experience gained in one EU member state to be recognized in the others.

Retirement and other social-security benefits should be easier to transfer. A single Web site on employment in Europe should be established to provide people with high-quality information about job opportunities abroad.

The task force calls for better language training, with all pupils able to speak at least two languages in addition to their mother tongue by the time they leave secondary school, and primary-school pupils learning foreign languages by the age of eight.

Higher-education students, the task force recommends, should all spend a third of their time studying in an EU member state other than their own.