EU SKILLAB project aims to combat the barriers to digitalisation of the European labour market

Tuesday, March 5, 2024 - 08:36 by Shanda Giacomoni

Eclipse Foundation participates in Horizon Europe Project SKILLAB

A European consortium of 10 organisations from Greece, Romania, Luxembourg, Germany, Spain, and Cyprus has launched SKILLAB: Monitoring The Demand And Supply Of Skills In The European Labour Market, a project funded by the European Union’s HORIZON Research and Innovations Actions (RIA). 

As society is continuously adapting to technological change, the EU faces a severe skills shortage, with the labour market in many sectors and regions being unable to keep up. SKILLAB addresses the need for a centralised knowledge hub to combat the barriers to digitalisation, with a focus on competency detection, skill shortage identification and forecasting, as well as workforce training and engagement. 

SKILLAB partners include academic institutions, use case providers, and technology providers. The project involves designing and implementing an intelligent platform using data analysis, machine learning and competency mining to provide a knowledge base for recommendation tools to develop skill strategies for enterprises and individuals. 

The Eclipse Foundation, a leading global open source software foundation and the largest open source organisation in Europe, will support SKILLAB with services, including project communications, open source community building, and IP management. The foundation will contribute a use case related to skills required in open source communities, including organising sessions to validate the structure and organisation of SKILLAB and evaluate its effectiveness in skills matching between employers and employees in the context of open source projects.  

“The European Labour Market is constantly changing, with digital skills at the forefront. The advent of Artificial Intelligence has turned the tables on which skills are in supply and demand, often creating gaps in the talented workforce and the needs of companies. SKILLAB is the solution to this problem, boasting a unified platform that monitors the demand for skills in Europe and offers effective strategies for upskilling and reskilling of European citizens”, says Lefteris Angelis, Professor at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Coordinator of the SKILLAB project. “At its core, SKILLAB strives to embrace the wind of change in the skills of the market and provide an efficient service that leverages cutting-edge technologies for cutting-edge recommendations on skills advancement.” 

“Open source is a main driver for leveraging the innovation potential of European society”, says Philippe Krief, Research Relations Director at the Eclipse Foundation. “Improving the knowledge and free flow of the skills demanded in open source communities will be a great added value for us as an Open Source Foundation and even more for our member organisations investing in open source”.

To learn more about SKILLAB, follow us on social media @SkillabProjectLinkedIn or visit skillab-project.eu.

 

About the Eclipse Foundation

The Eclipse Foundation provides our global community of individuals and organisations with a business-friendly environment for open source software collaboration and innovation. We host the Eclipse IDE, Adoptium, Software Defined Vehicle, Jakarta EE, and over 415 open source projects, including runtimes, tools, specifications, and frameworks for cloud and edge applications, IoT, AI, automotive, systems engineering, open processor designs, and many others. Headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, the Eclipse Foundation is an international non-profit association supported by over 350 members. To learn more, follow us on social media @EclipseFdnLinkedIn, or visit eclipse.org.

 

SKILLAB project has received funding from the European Commission programme Horizon Europe under grant agreement number 101132663.