Introduction

Skill needs analyses are action-oriented research. Particularly in the field of vocational training, planers and decision-makers in politics and economy search for guidelines for training strategies that qualify people to participate in the shaping of the quick economic and technological change. A European skill needs analysis contributes to the development of such guidelines but it cannot do it all on its own. It needs the dialogue with the practical educational actors in politics and economy. In a European dimension, too, the concrete training needs are defined distinctly in terms of the actual state and the desired state: in regions, at the level of sectors of the economy, at the level of companies. The same applies all the more to the practical translation of identified trends of needs into new training strategies and contents in the differentiated educational landscape Europe’s through a multitude of actors and providers of training.