The importance of a highly skilled workforce has become increasingly relevant in the context of the European Union new strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth - ¿Europe 2020¿. At the individual level, a good education is increasingly decisive for employment prospects and earnings levels. The skills and competences of the workforce are the product of a large variety of learning activities that take place in diverse institutional contexts. While good initial education provides an essential foundation, learning continues through the working years. Policies encouraging wide participation in continuing training are therefore an important component of lifelong learning strategies.
Very little is known concerning differences in continuing training or their causes and consequences. Such information would be useful for assessing policy choices related to training, such as whether to encourage an overall increase in training levels or to attempt to redirect training investments toward groups currently receiving little training.
This publication deal with some of these issues. First, some aggregate measures using harmonised data from European surveys on training are constructed and analysed. Next, a set of stylised facts concerning differences in the level of training across European countries are discussed. A more formal analysis of the robustness of cross-country differences in the level of training is included; cross-country rank correlations are calculated between the various measures of training. A concluding section considers some policy implications for this area.JRC.DG.G.9-Econometrics and applied statistic
