What’s does Europe’s future need? It needs you.

You’re doing your best to live responsibly. You shop carefully. You want to ‘green’ your house with solar panels. You want to adopt the latest digital technologies to eliminate waste (and cut your bills). You want to be part of the ‘smart’ revolution. But there’s a problem. Green infrastructure, digital technology and smart living all depend on one thing: skilled people to make them happen.

By 2030, the EU will need more than one million solar workers to meet our renewable energy targets. At this very minute, with a war raging in Europe, our cybersecurity is under-staffed by nearly 300,000. We need engineers for wind turbines. We need ICT specialists, a demand of 20 million ICT workers in the EU by 2030. We must cultivate a sustainable future in energy, industry, and technology. In Europe, there’s no shortage of worthwhile, rewarding jobs, yet more than three-quarters of businesses in the EU report difficulties in finding skilled workers. It seems that our labour market has simply lost touch with our aspirations.

There are two prices to pay for ‘losing touch’. The first is economic. As global pressures increase, our continent is falling behind in smart productivity. But we’re also wasting people and opportunities. Women, for example, currently under-represented in the workplace, are key to skills transition. What’s holding them back? We also need to think about employers and how their goals and needs should feed into the training of employees. Without the employer/employee match, our aspirations will falter.

With all this in mind, the EPP Group in the European Parliament instigated the European Year of Skills and urges the EU to focus particularly on incentivising new workers to train for newly-forged and emerging jobs and on encouraging established workers to embrace flexibility. We in the EPP Group are also determined that a Year of Skills must include everybody: people currently not in education, employment or training; people with disabilities; people from disadvantaged backgrounds; and people living in remote areas. We need everybody’s help to reverse the current trends. And talking about inclusion is not enough. Only with practical support for the upskilling, reskilling and lifelong learning agenda can we keep the EU attractive and competitive, not only for our citizens. If the EU is to flourish, Europe needs to be an attractive place to work for all global talent.

Living responsibly is no longer a choice, it’s a necessity, and we in the EPP Group are pressing hard for the EU to do all it can to ensure our whole workforce is ready to meet our new challenges. In our homes and at our work, we are poised for a smart revolution. As politicians, we can support the revolution. But a smart revolution also needs smart people. We believe that one of those smart people is you.