Rotterdam, 18 September 2008 at 09.30

Your Royal Highness, the Princess of Holland,
Distinguished guests,
Ladies and gentlemen,

It is a great pleasure and honour for me to be in Rotterdam to open EuroSkills 2008, the first ever Europe-wide skills competition.

I want to first of all thank and congratulate all those who have been involved [EuroSkills 2008, our Dutch partners, the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, Skills Netherlands, European Skills Promotion Organisation, the City of Rotterdam and sponsors]. Your efforts have guaranteed the success of EuroSkills 2008.

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We are very lucky to be surrounded by so many talented young people today. Let us take a moment to think about their future. If we really think ahead – to 2050, say -, when today’s young people will still be part of the workforce – we are brought up short. We have very little idea of what the world will look like; what jobs will look like.

We have seen a great deal of change so far in our lifetimes. But the pace of change over the next 50 years will far outstrip what we have experienced.

How can we prepare our young people for the challenges ahead? The jobs they start out in will be transformed in their lifetimes. They are quite likely to change job, perhaps change career, several times in their working lives.

While we don’t yet know what the jobs of the future will be, we do know that more and more jobs will demand high skills. Routine jobs will tend to disappear. Overall, everyone will need to keep increasing their skills over their lifetimes.

We must support our young people as they start this journey. We need to ensure that young people are able to keep learning, throughout their lives, developing their capacity to change without fearing the future.

This stage of formative training is vital: it is here that the seeds of ‘learning to learn’ are sown. This is the first step in taking care of our most precious asset – our people, and their talents.

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But talents have to be developed and motivated. We need to do more, invest more, and work with our young generation to offer the best opportunities.

EuroSkills takes us in the right direction, promoting the best vocational skills of youngsters by demonstrating, comparing and testing themselves in the skills competitions.

Yesterday’s greeting ceremony for the young competitors was a wonderful sight. Teams of young Europeans from 31 countries, proud of their achievements, passionate about their disciplines.

Our goal should be to infuse the world of vocational training with this enthusiasm and excellence.

Europe needs to make vocational jobs and careers more attractive, while taking them to ever higher skill levels. We must emphasise the quality side of vocational education and training.

At EuroSkills, we will show young people in Europe that having mastered a traditional craft such as technician, bricklayer or plumber is something to be proud of.

We will demonstrate to a broad public that vocational jobs are modern, advanced and highly appreciated professions. And that high skilled professionals are urgently in demand on the European labour market.

The last WorldSkills competition, which took place in Japan in November last year, showed us that Europe still has to catch up on our Asian competitors such as Korea or Japan.

EuroSkills is an excellent platform for improvement, so that we can become more competitive on the global scale.

Before I finish, allow me to underline another way in which Euroskills is truly innovative.

The whole concept of competitions as a way of demonstrating skills fits neatly with the change of direction that education and training are taking in Europe.

If our young people are going to enjoy satisfying working lives and careers, we must help them to build a strong and durable set of skills and competences.

These skills must be transparent and comparable: it must be clear what the young person is capable of doing.

The skills must be transferable: it should be possible, throughout a lifetime, to build on these skills to acquire more expertise, more competences.

Most importantly, the skills must be relevant to what the labour market needs.

This is the fundamental shift today in education and training. We are moving from input – knowledge – to outcome – how we can put our knowledge to use.

EuroSkills has all this. These competitions are based on practical work-based training. They are developed in close cooperation with companies. And they give young people the chance to actually show the skills they have worked at and developed.

As I said, I feel we are all very lucky to be here, surrounded by so many of Europe’s talented young professionals, infected by their enthusiasm, and their willingness to keep on learning.

I am already convinced, after meeting the participants yesterday, that the first ever Europe-wide skills competition will be a success.

This is the start of a great new tradition.

The competition is a “first” for the majority of the new Member States who did not previously compete in WorldSkills.

I am happy to hear that Poland intends to organise the next EuroSkills event in 2010 and I hope this intention will be turned into a reality.

We will be back for the next edition!