Future skills in Germany - German Education Server

This dossier presents the most important sources available in English on the topic of future skills in Germany. 

The driving forces behind the discussion on future skills in Germany are the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft (Donors' Association for the Promotion of Sciences and Humanities in Germany), the management consultancy McKinsey, and the Bertelsmann Foundation – unfortunately, the latter does not offer any documents on future skills in English.

The topic of future skills is not without controversy in Germany either. One major point of criticism is the narrow view of future skills, which are seen as being solely about the employability of people in the labour market and the economy. Two well-known critical articles on future skills were written by Prof. Marco Kalz from the Heidelberg University of Education (1, 2). Unfortunately, the articles are not available in English.  

The German government has set itself the goal of promoting continuing vocational training and lifelong learning more strongly than before. The National Skills Strategy has been developed under the leadership of the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) and the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs. Its primary aim is to find answers to digital change and ensure equal opportunities [...]

document from: Bundesministerium für Bildung, Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend

"Skills Anticipation in Countries" is a series of analytical short reports on the approach to skills anticipation and matching in all EU countries. The report is divided into individual chapter pages. Navigation through the chapters is located in the right-hand menu bar.  The institution offering the report is the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (CEDEFOP).

"The skill forecast country reports summarise key future trends in jobs and skills for individual EU Member States. They offer a concise outlook on national employment trends by sector, occupational group and education level, as well as developments in the working age population by age and gender. Implications for future labour market imbalances can be identified when demand and supply are looked at [...]

English language discussion paper 2018.

This website from the international management consultancy McKinsey provides an overview and brief summary of the report "Jobs lost, jobs gained: Workforce transitions in a time of automation." The page also includes a front-page section with updates to the report. The report itself (Note: only a certain number of downloads seem to be allowed, then you have to log in) focuses on six countries: China, Germany, [...]

"This paper describes how the variety of existing future skills approaches can be compared conceptually. For this purpose, a framework model for future skills is proposed, which contains 17 future skills profiles in three different categories. The skill names of the dozen or so future skills studies published in the German-speaking world since 2015 are assigned to the 17 future skills profiles using a [...]

"This open access book analyses the changing basic coordinates of higher education worldwide and poses the question of how higher education must develop in order to survive in a world of global challenges, ever faster changing social upheavals and innovation-driven, agile fields of work. The NextSkills study uses a qualitative-quantitative multi-method design to construct and validate a holistic future skills [...]

Charts reporting information about Germany: Figure 49: Future Fields Readiness Indices scores in Germany Figure 50: Volume of discussions and engagement level associated with the four key technologies for the future in Germany (Sept 2017 - Sept 2018) Figure 51: Germany’s Global Technology Readiness Index broken down by knowledge dimension (Sept 2017 - Sept 2018) Figure 52: Volume of discussions [...]

The Institute for Lifelong Learning at the Technical University of Munich provides a brief overview of its understanding of future skills.  This is  "guided by current publications on the subject. These include the definition of the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft e.V. (Donors’ Association for the Promotion of Sciences and Humanities in Germany), which, in cooperation with [...]

FutureSkills4U is a comparison portal for various FutureSkills theories and models. It offers the following comparison options: * Approaches & Reviews: Read expert reviews and profiles of the different FutureSkills approaches * Competence Library: Explore skills / competencies by approach * Competence Navigator: Filter by topics such as "Critical Thinking" or "Intercultural Competence" * Configurator: [...]