Europe Adds New Skills Passport Page To Solve Problem Of Too Many Missing Pages
The EU’s plan to recognise qualifications across borders now faces its greatest challenge: deciding where to staple the extra proof of being useful.
BRUSSELS, Europe’s attempt to make workers’ qualifications easier to recognise across borders has met its usual administrative obstacle: the existing skills passport apparently does not contain enough paper. The European Commission has proposed a Skills Portability Act. The EU-backed EMPASS project is promoting micro-credentials for practical employability skills. Officials have therefore reached the only conclusion available to a continent with a long relationship with filing systems: add another page.
It would go between “Things I Can Do” and “Things I Can Probably Learn With Three Weeks’ Notice”, according to a diagram discovered by nobody and approved by the imaginary European Office of Document Extension. There is room for formal qualifications and practical abilities. A smaller box asks whether the applicant can describe either without saying “transferable competences”.
“Europe has spent decades asking whether a plumber is qualified to plumb in another country,” said Mikkel Varnish, deputy coordinator of the Committee for Portable Paperwork. “The answer may finally be yes, provided the plumber can produce the correct credential in the correct format, with the correct corner folded down.”
“The worker will be easier to move once we finish moving the paperwork.”
That paperwork would have company. Under the developing system, workers could collect micro-credentials for practical skills that traditional certificates miss. Operating unfamiliar machinery qualifies. So does solving a problem before lunch, or finding the person who knows where the spare cables are kept. Every achievement would become a digital badge, then be printed for safety, translated into 24 languages and filed in a folder large enough to need its own train seat.
The new page is expected to help employers find people who can actually do useful things. This had previously been delayed by the lack of a field marked “Useful Things”. A guidance note from the fictional Directorate-General for Very Specific Boxes advises applicants to list skills by portability, from “can work anywhere” down to “understands this printer”.
Some officials still felt the passport was holding back. A man standing nearby suggested a fold-out section for skills acquired accidentally, including knowing which cupboard has the mugs and spotting when a meeting should have been an email. Officials rejected it. Accidental competence would need its own validation framework, three pilot schemes and a commemorative stamp.
For now, Europe’s labour-market bottlenecks remain where they were. Soon they may come with a neat standardised explanation. “The worker will be easier to move,” said Varnish, “once we have finished moving the paperwork.” The page should improve portability immediately, assuming somebody can find the office authorised to issue it.
The actual story is the Commission’s proposed Skills Portability Act and EMPASS’s work on micro-credentials. The extra pages, boxes and paperwork bureaucracy have been lovingly ruined here.