The last European Skills and Job Survey (ESJS) developed by CEDEFOP (2015) highlights that 43% of adult employees have recently experienced changes in the technologies they use at work and 47% saw changes in their working methods or practices. About one in five considers it very likely that several of their skills will become outdated in the next five years.
International organisations in the field highlighted that besides the technological shift and the estimated impact of the Fourth industrial revolution, wider disruptive changes to business models will have a profound impact on the employment landscape over the coming years. Many of the major drivers of transformation currently affecting global industries are expected to have a significant impact on jobs, ranging from significant job creation to job displacement, and from heightened labour productivity to widening skills gaps.
In many industries and countries, the most in-demand occupations or specialties did not exist ten or even five years ago, and the pace of change is set to accelerate. By one popular estimate, 65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that don’t yet exist.
In such a rapidly evolving employment landscape, the ability to anticipate and prepare for future skill requirements, job content and the aggregate effect on employment is increasingly critical for businesses, governments and individuals in order to fully seize the opportunities presented by these trends—and to mitigate undesirable outcomes.
The Interactive Training Gap Identifier for professions and roles in the food-related sectors as been designed and developed as a three-step path as follows:
Step 1. Definition and classification of the skills
Step 2. Choice of the approach to connect skill needs and training design
Step 3. Map of the jobs and of professional profiles around which the Interactive Training Gap Identifier is structured.
The Interactive Training Gap Identifier is intended to be a multi-purpose tool and aimed to support different target end-users here categorized as “profile”:
Profile 1: Training Agencies/Universities/Training Designers and Training Facilitators, who focus on the food manufacturing sector and related professions, and delivering education or training (or both).
They are interested in:
a) emerging skill standards for the different career paths in the food industry;
b) inputs to better design academic courses and/or CDPs and/or innovative training schemes for food professionals.
Profile 2: HR Managers/ Food Entrepreneurs/Business Associations, who need to keep updated skills and to plan/orient training investments in the best way. They are interested in:
a) To define job requirements for new entrants properly;
b) To interact with university and technical education so as to create educational paths that will reduce/avoid the skill mismatch;
c) To get tools for performance appraisal of workers; d) have a map to plan and deliver on-the-job training.
Profile 3: Entrants in the labour market/Professionals/ Individual employees, who need to plan their careers and want to invest in their up-/re-skilling according to clear specifications of skill requirements for desired job positions. They interested in:
a) self-assess their skills against standards;
b) become aware of possible career paths in the food sector;
c) getting a support to check general and soft skills also in order to better present their profiles for placement.
To know more about the methodological framework we used, download.