Skills shortages and skills gaps are persistent challenges across European labour markets, affecting productivity, competitiveness, and social cohesion. In the SkillsPULSE approach, skills shortages occur when employers struggle to recruit workers with the required qualifications or experience, while skills gaps arise when existing workers do not possess the skills needed to meet organisational demands. Contrary to the assumption that such mismatches will naturally resolve over time, evidence shows that they often persist and generate long-term negative effects for workers, firms, and economies; however, the existing evidence base appears to be limited because there is a lack of measurement consistency across the measurement approaches that do exist.
SkillsPULSE addresses these challenges by improving the understanding, measurement, and anticipation of skills shortages and gaps across Europe. Its overall objective is to develop a comprehensive methodological framework that identifies where skills deficiencies arise, why they occur, and how they are likely to evolve, particularly in the context of digitalisation and structural economic change. By combining social science research, labour market analysis, and data-driven methods, SkillsPULSE aims to generate actionable intelligence that enables policymakers and stakeholders to design more effective education, training, and labour market policies at national and European levels.