Analysis reveals that adult education supports re-skilling in response to skill shortages, implying gaps in active labor market policy.
European economies face the task of providing the necessary skills for the “twin transition” in a period of skill shortage. As a result, we may expect countries to reorient their labor market policy towards re‐skilling. We look for evidence of a reorientation in two relevant policy fields: active labor market policy (ALMP) and adult education (AE). We explore general trends in both fields based on quantitative indicators and compare recent policy developments in four countries with strong ALMP and AE sectors: Denmark, France, Germany, and Sweden. We do not observe clear evidence of a general movement away from activation and towards re‐skilling in ALMP. However, in AE, we identify several re‐skilling initiatives that address skill shortages. Relying on insights from queuing theories of hiring and training, we argue that due to changes in the population targeted by ALMP, the locus of re‐skilling policy is increasingly moving towards AE.
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Bonoli et al. (2025) studied this question.
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