We are delighted to announce that our esteemed member, prof. d-r Dimitar Nikoloski, participated in the “Cedefop Skills Forecast Workshop, Preparing the 2025 release”, held on 18-19 April 2024 at the Cedefop premises in Thessaloniki. This event was organized by the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (Cedefop) in collaboration with Cambridge Econometrics (CE).
The preparation of Cedefop Skills Forecast is supported by a network of country experts (Individual Country Experts). The ICEs contribute to increasing the quality of the forecasts by commenting and validating the methods, tools, and results. Cedefop organises regular technical workshops to provide a platform for experts to meet and provide direct feedback to Cedefop. The aim of the workshops is to involve national experts in the process of preparing a Skills Forecast release, drawing not only on their knowledge and expertise in skills forecasting, but also on their country specific insights.
The workshop provides an opportunity to bring together Cedefop, the research team, and the group of individual country experts to:

• Validate the results of the updated projections for the 2025 release.
• Discuss inputs for the two sensitivities that will accompany the baseline projections.
• Present the on-going work on labour shortages and receive feedback.

The workshop is organised as a series of presentations and discussions. Background notes are circulated in advance. These are prepared by team members so that participants are informed on the key issues to be debated. The aim of the sessions is to develop a focussed dialogue with individual country experts. For the structured group discussions, each country expert is allocated to a country group. In each country group, the discussions are facilitated by a member of the research
team and a Country Group Expert (CGE). The CGE will synthesise the country group discussion and report back to the complete workshop group.