Skill shortages in the Finnish labour market are increasingly apparent and there are growing concerns about the supply of higher-level skills, given demographic change and stagnating educational attainment levels. Finland’s skill development system must get future-ready. This report analyses the status quo of the Finnish continuous learning system for adults, highlights its key challenges and makes actionable policy recommendations.

Germany has a strong skill development system. The country’s 15‐year‐old students performed above the OECD average in the last (2018) edition of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), continuing a trend of significant improvement since PISA’s first edition in 2000.

This report provides examples and recommendations to help overcome obstacles to engage low-skilled workers and their employers in skills development. England has implemented impressive measures aimed at helping workers and employers to upskill. Nonetheless, there remains room for improvement.

This report aims to understand the factors that make adult learning reforms succeed. It identifies lessons from six countries that have significantly increased participation over the past decades: Austria, Estonia, Italy, Hungary, the Netherlands and Singapore.

Workers’ skills are an essential asset for firms to recover from the COVID-19 shock and succeed in the twin digital and green transitions. Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) face special barriers to investing in human capital because of their size and more limited access to information and capital markets. This report identifies policies that are successful in promoting SMEs’ investment in the skills of employees, managers or entrepreneurs.

Enterprises are a key provider of education and training for adults across OECD countries. Yet, policy-makers lack a detailed understanding of how training in enterprises takes place. This report opens the black box of training and informal learning in enterprises by providing in-depth insights on: i) what training and learning opportunities enterprises provide; ii) why they provide training (or not); and iii) how they make decisions about training.

This report examined how Finland has been incorporating anticipatory functions within its governance system to deal with complex and future challenges in a systemic way. The report applies a new model of anticipatory innovation governance (AIG), developed by the OECD, addressing a considerable gap in prior knowledge and guidance on how governments prepare for unknowable futures.