CESI Summer Days 2025: A New Quality Jobs Roadmap for Europe

Dear members, partners, and friends,

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As we approach CESI's Summer Days 2025 under the headline "A New Quality Jobs Roadmap - The Role of Active Labour Market Policies", the timing is significant: Labour markets across Europe are under extraordinary pressure.

The overlapping challenges of demographic shifts, technological disruption, the twin green and digital transitions, geopolitical instability, and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic are converging in unprecedented ways.

The most recent Eurofound Yearbook 2024, published in May 2025, leaves no doubt: Europe faces not a temporary labour market imbalance, but a long-term, structural workforce crisis. Vacancy rates remain historically high in key sectors such as construction, ICT, health and care services, with SMEs especially struggling to recruit workers with the right skills.

In 2023 alone, 80% of SMEs reported difficulties finding qualified staff, directly threatening the EU's ability to meet its green and digital transition targets. In sectors central to climate action, such as heat pump installation, shortages of tens of thousands of skilled workers risk derailing critical decarbonisation objectives.

Against this complex backdrop, we believe that active labour market policies (ALMPs) are no longer an optional labour market instrument - they are the cornerstone of a socially resilient, competitive and fair Europe. But to succeed, ALMPs must adopt a two-fold mission: they must address both supply-side and demand-side shortcomings.

The Commission's latest 2024 action plan and Union of Skills initiative echo this integrated approach: empowering individuals to reskill, upskill and access decent work, while actively engaging businesses to improve job quality, invest in training, and adapt work organisation.

The Eurofound findings are clear: many of the sectors facing the most acute shortages are precisely those with some of the poorest working conditions - low wages, high physical demands, unsocial hours, precarious contracts and elevated burnout risks.

For ALMPs to deliver, we need strong investment in training, robust public employment services, and above all, genuine social dialogue at every level. Workers and their trade unions must be co-architects of these transitions. Quality employment is not just about job creation - it is about creating sustainable jobs that provide fair pay, dignity, autonomy, security, and career prospects.

Meaningful involvement of social partners is essential. Eurofound's latest research shows, while social partners are often consulted, their involvement in the concrete design and monitoring of Just Transition and ALMP measures remains insufficient in many Member States. A stronger role for trade unions, worker representation, and collective bargaining must be a non-negotiable pillar of the just initiated Quality Jobs Roadmap.

The CESI Summer Days 2025 offer a good opportunity to move from diagnosis to solution. Over two days, representatives from EU institutions, think tanks, public employment services, the ILO, the European Economic and Social Committee, civil society and not least trade unions will explore:

-       How to overcome persistent labour and skills shortages through targeted, inclusive ALMPs.

-       How education, VET, dual learning and reskilling systems must be strengthened to address both skills shortages and inequalities, with a focus on SMEs that often lack training capacities.

-       How to tackle uneven impacts of the green and digital transitions, which risk deepening social divides if not accompanied by proactive support for vulnerable workers and regions.

-       How can ALMPs be leveraged to create sustainable and inclusive employment.

-       What is the role of public and private actors in delivering effective ALMPs.

-       How can trade unions and civil society contribute to shaping active labour market frameworks that leave no one behind.

-       What sector-specific strategies are needed to respond to disruptions such as industrial transformation or refugee integration.

Tackling these challenges will require initiatives that cut across silos and integrate employment, education, industrial, social and migration policies.

In this spirit, I look forward to welcoming all participants in Brussels.

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With kindest regards,
Klaus Heeger