Objectives

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The EU currently has high rates of early school leavers and young adults who have not completed upper secondary education. Given that education is a crucial prerequisite for acquiring the necessary skills to transition successfully into the labour market, and further being able to participate as a citizen in a democratic knowledge society, this is an alarming situation. These problems among young Europeans are accompanied and aggravated by structural changes within the EU. The recent transitions from industrial to knowledge societies with their fast technological developments have led to an increasing uncertainty about which capabilities are needed for an individual to become a productive member of modern society.


“Making Capabilities Work” (WorkAble) will provide knowledge on how to enable young people to act as capable citizens in the labour markets of European knowledge societies. It assesses the political and institutional strategies aiming to cope with the high rates of youth unemployment, early school leaving and dropouts from upper secondary education.


WorkAble will adopt a comparative perspective and analyse institutional employment policies and educational regimes on a local and regional, a national and a European level. This will provide a consistent framework for reconstructing commonalities and differences, identifying best-practice solutions and providing knowledge that will enable each regime to learn from the others through comparative research.


Based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative analyses of the perspectives and strategies of all relevant actors, WorkAble will pursue three main objectives within the framework of six Work Packages. It aims to deliver evidence-based knowledge that will:

  • Extend young people’s capabilities to act as fully participating citizens in emerging European knowledge societies;
  • Promote skills and competencies in young people that are conducive to improving the economic productivity and competitiveness of Europe;
  • Develop transversal strategies integrating central economic, educational and social issues in order to close the capability gap in the young and particularly the inadequacies between education and training and the requisites of the knowledge society to which they, and, above all, the more disadvantaged are exposed.