According to the above-mentioned joint study on 61 countries undertaken by the ILO, ETF and Cedefop, the information on skills needs is used by a majority of the countries in developing policy, updating occupational standards, developing apprenticeship programmes, revising and designing training programmes, and the upskilling of trainers (Kriechel and Veiter, forthcoming) This study also demonstrates the extent to which the skills needs information is used by the social partners. Generally, they use it primarily for influencing the policies of the Ministries of Education and Labour and for informing collective bargaining. However, 34 per cent of the employers’ associations and 57 per cent of trade unions use it for developing and funding apprenticeship (or work-experience) programmes (Ibid). One of the direct uses of skill needs assessments in Australia, Northern Ireland and Turkey, for example, is to promote apprenticeships in occupations and industries with a greater demand for skilled labour.

Individual countries have set up agencies that cover aspects of skills anticipation and use the information for TVET training, particularly at sectoral level. In Canada, for example, as may be seen in box 33, sector skills councils are responsible for providing sector-specific information on skill needs that, inter alia, inform the revision and development of apprenticeship programmes.

Box 3: Task of sector skills councils - Canada

In Brazil, for example, the National Apprenticeship Services (for the industry, for commerce and the service sector, for rural workers for transport workers) have been set up to provide a variety of TVET services at the sectoral level. SENAI, the National Apprenticeship Service for Industry, engages in skills anticipation exercises, which aim to identify technological and organizational change in the industry and its impacts on future training and qualification needs in both quantitative and qualitative terms - and in the provision of TVET products, such as apprenticeship training (Ibid).