Labour Needs of the EU’s Green Transition

On March 21, the MOBILISE Project Director, Huub Mudde, PhD, was one of the speakers at the workshop on ‘Labour Needs of the EU’s Green Transition’. In his presentation he focused on how MOBILISE is contributing to overcoming the skills gap in the Netherlands, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Tunisia in the horticulture sector.

The workshop, organised in the context of the EU Labour Mobility Practitioners’ Network by ICMPD together with the Center for Global Development (CGD),brought together labour migration practitioners and representatives from industry, research, and government, to explore the labour demand created by the green transition in the EU and the role that skilled labour migration, combined with support for training at home and abroad, could have in meeting this demand.

Important aspects mentioned at the workshop were the need to have a profound involvement of the private sector, the need to couple training with international mobility, alignment of skills development between host countries and countries of origin, the importance of working with trustworthy education and training providers, and the need for cost-sharing mechanisms in relation to the complexity of sustaining circular migration.

In his contribution to the discussion, Huub Mudde shared MOBILISE’s positive experience of the active involvement of companies in all the four countries. Furthermore, he stressed the need to focus on cross-cutting twenty-first century skills, because that are skills required by all workers and will also be needed in future. He indicated that the latest technological innovations could be taught through involvement of companies.