Toulouse Business School (Work Employment and Health Research Group) in collaboration with Curtin University Business School is hosting the International Conference on Skills for the Future: Training, employment, occupations and employability in turbulent times.

There is universal policy consensus on the need to build workforce skills to support economic development and cope with evolving labour market needs in a period of profound and sustained restructuring. This political consensus involves international agencies such as the OECD, ILO, IMF and World Bank, supra-national regional bodies such as the EU and APEC and governments of nation states. All stress the importance of forecasting future skills needs to ensure that education and training systems are suitably adapted and to avoid skills gaps, shortages and mismatches.

It is also widely recognised that occupations are evolving as sectors undergo a profound restructuring, with some disappearing and new occupations emerging, demanding opportunities for continuous acquisition of new competences. Some competences are susceptible to transfer between occupations particularly in the case of skills shortages (for example, nurses taking on new tasks formerly reserved for doctors in the face of increasing shortages of doctors).

This Conference is designed to provide the intellectual space for debates surrounding skills and competence, training and development, occupations, employment and employability. Additionally, we are interested in papers addressing related topics such as migration and migrant workers, union-led learning, restructuring, precarious work and unemployment, high performance work systems and worker well-being. Vulnerable workers and those in precarious work will be rendered more vulnerable by the changes underway unless they have the opportunity to develop the competences supporting adaptability and employability.

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