EU Member States adopt the Commission's proposal to revise the Europass CV

Yesterday, April 12, EU Member States adopted the Commission’s proposal to revise the Europass framework. The revision, which aims at simplifying and modernising the Europass CV and other skills tools for the digital age, will enable people across the EU to make their skills and qualifications more visible, and will help policy makers to anticipate labour market needs and trends.

With this agreement, the Commission has now delivered on all ten actions announced under the Skills Agenda for Europe, launched in June 2016. In reaction to the agreement of the Member States, Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs, Skills and Labour Mobility, Marianne Thyssen, has said that “with this final legislative adoption, we have now fully delivered on all 10 actions of the Skills Agenda for Europe”.

A key tool

For over a decade, Europass has been a key tool to support better communication and understanding of skills and qualifications. It has served as a crucial bridge between the worlds of work and education and training. There are over 55,000 visits a day to the Europass portal and over 100 million downloads of the Europass CV since 2004.

Europass has clearly demonstrated its added value as a vehicle to communicate skills across the EU, but it has to evolve in parallel to challenges and opportunities in the digital age.

Thanks to today’s adoption of our proposal to modernise Europass, the framework will offer an e-portfolio for storing and sharing information, tools for people to self-assess their skills and tools for describing formal and informal learning as well as qualifications.

For the first time, Europass will also offer information to support career management including information on trends and demands in the labour market and on guidance and learning opportunities across Europe. In this sense, the Commission looks forward to beginning work on implementation of this new era for Europass in close co-operation with the Member States and stakeholders.

About Europass

With more than 60 million CVs created, the Europass framework is the best known European initiative for documenting skills, qualifications and professional experience. Despite having undergone several improvements since its launch, major challenges remain regarding its tools and services due to recent technical, educational and labour market developments. The European Commission’s proposal would revise the Europass tools (and repeal Decision 2241/2004/EC).

The objective is to ensure the realisation of the tools’ full potential and to update them so that they meet ever-shifting requirements (for instance, the increasing role of non-formal skills and digitalisation). It also aims to raise public awareness and to ensure better synergies with other online tools in the same domain, in order to allow matching, reuse and integration of data.