The EU Union of Skills and Programme Evaluation: Measuring What Employers Now Expect

Answer up front: In March 2025 the European Commission launched the Union of Skills, a flagship strategy built on a blunt diagnosis: Europe cannot compete without closing its skills gaps. For programme directors and quality-assurance offices, the strategic message is that graduate skills — demonstrable, portable, labour-market-relevant — are becoming the currency by which higher education is judged. That has a direct consequence for evaluation. A course-evaluation system that measures whether students were satisfied, and stops there, is instrumented for the wrong outcome. The task now is to evidence what students can do, and whether the programme moved them toward it.

What the Union of Skills is, and why it changes the frame

Announced on 5 March 2025 in COM(2025) 90 and inspired by the Draghi and Letta reports on European competitiveness, the Union of Skills organises around four goals: building skills for quality jobs, upskilling and reskilling an agile workforce, circulating skills across the EU, and attracting and retaining talent. It is backed by a new European Skills High-Level Board and a European Skills Intelligence Observatory intended to give policymakers and institutions a sharper, real-time picture of what the labour market actually needs.

The numbers behind it are stark, and they are the Commission's own. Nearly four in five EU SMEs struggle to find workers with the skills they need. One in five adults struggles with basic reading and writing. Fewer than 40% of adults participate in any education or training, against a 2030 target of 60%. And in 2025 only 60% of people aged 16–74 had at least basic digital skills — twenty percentage points below the EU's own 2030 goal. These are not abstractions to a programme director; they are the conditions your graduates enter, and increasingly the yardstick against which your programme's value is assessed.

Satisfaction is a lagging, and misleading, proxy for skill

The dominant instrument in European higher education remains the end-of-term satisfaction survey: Likert items, a departmental average, a dashboard. The problem is not that satisfaction is worthless — it captures something real about engagement and experience. The problem is that satisfaction and skill acquisition are only loosely related, and sometimes inversely so.

The evidence here is uncomfortable. Research on "active learning" finds that students in courses using effortful, evidence-based methods often rate the teaching lower even as they learn more, because the cognitive effort feels like poor teaching in the moment. Deslauriers and colleagues, in a 2019 PNAS study, showed exactly this dissociation between feeling of learning and actual learning. If a programme optimises for satisfaction, it can systematically penalise the pedagogy that builds the very skills the Union of Skills prizes. Measuring satisfaction and inferring capability is not a shortcut — it is a category error.

The Union of Skills sharpens a point European graduate-outcomes work has made for years: employers and students perceive skills gaps differently, and neither perception is the same as demonstrated competence. Employer surveys consistently report shortfalls in communication, problem-solving and adaptability among graduates who nonetheless rated their courses highly. The satisfaction number did not see it coming.

What programme evaluation should measure instead

If skills are the outcome, evaluation has to reach for evidence closer to capability. Three shifts matter.

First, evaluate at the programme level, not just the module level. Skills like critical reasoning, collaboration and digital fluency are cultivated across a whole degree, not delivered in a single module. A programme-level view can ask whether the curriculum as a system builds the intended capabilities — a question no individual module survey can answer. This aligns with the Union of Skills emphasis on coherent, stackable learning rather than isolated courses.

Second, map feedback to a shared skills vocabulary. Europe already has the infrastructure: the ESCO classification of skills, competences and occupations gives institutions a common language to connect what a programme teaches to what the labour market demands. Evaluation that tags student experience and outcomes against ESCO becomes legible to the Skills Intelligence Observatory logic the Union of Skills is building.

Third, close the employer loop deliberately. The Union of Skills governance model — a High-Level Board, an Observatory — is institutionalising employer intelligence at EU scale. Programmes should mirror it locally, treating employer feedback and labour-market intelligence from job postings as standing inputs to evaluation, not a one-off accreditation exercise. Pairing leading and lagging indicators — in-programme signals of skill development alongside graduate destination data — gives a picture that neither satisfaction nor a single employment statistic can.

"But universities aren't job-training factories"

The strongest objection to all this is principled, and it deserves a serious answer: reducing higher education to employer-defined skills is a category mistake of its own. Universities exist to build knowledge, critical citizens and public goods, not just to feed the labour market. Chasing an employability metric risks hollowing out the non-market returns — democratic participation, cultural capacity, wellbeing — that higher education also produces and that no skills taxonomy captures.

This is correct, and it is a reason to design evaluation carefully, not to opt out. The answer is not to measure employability instead of education, but to add a defensible skills dimension alongside the broader ones, and to be honest about what each measures. There is also a genuine methodological caution: course evaluation cannot directly observe employability, which is mediated by many factors — the economy, the graduate's networks, luck — that a programme does not control. What a programme can evaluate is the proximal skill-building it is responsible for. Claiming your evaluation "measures employability" overreaches; claiming it evidences the skills that employability draws on is defensible. The Union of Skills does not require universities to become training providers. It requires them to be able to show, credibly, that they build the capabilities their graduates and Europe need — a demand that sits comfortably beside, not against, the university's wider mission.

A second objection: employer demand is a moving target, so any skills-based evaluation is chasing yesterday's requirements. That is why the Union of Skills invests in intelligence — continuous observation rather than a fixed skills list — and why evaluation should do the same, refreshing what it asks as the signals change rather than freezing a 2025 skills map into a 2030 survey.

Where Koji fits

Evidencing skills demands more than a rating scale, because skill claims live in what students describe, not the number they circle. Koji for Education runs AI-moderated conversational interviews that probe beyond a score: when a student says a project "helped me think differently", the AI can ask how, surfacing concrete evidence of reasoning, collaboration or applied competence that a Likert item flattens away. Automatic thematic analysis then aggregates those open-text responses across a whole programme, so directors can see which capabilities students consistently report building — and which the curriculum promises but does not deliver. Six structured question types keep the benchmarkable trend lines a quality office needs, while the conversational layer captures the skills story underneath them. Formative, mid-cycle collection means a programme can act while a cohort is still enrolled, not discover a gap at graduation. Because the same AI interview engine also powers employer and stakeholder research on the main Koji platform, the employer side of the loop can be run with the same method — closing the gap between what a programme teaches and what the labour market says it needs.

Koji does not measure employability directly — nothing honestly can. What it does is make the proximal evidence of skill development visible, in students' own words, at the programme scale the Union of Skills cares about.

The bottom line

The Union of Skills is a bet that Europe's future runs through what its people can do. Higher education is central to that bet, and evaluation is how a programme demonstrates it is holding up its end. Satisfaction data will not carry the argument. The institutions that thrive in this frame will be the ones that can evidence skills — specifically, credibly, and in students' own voices — rather than the ones with the highest average on a five-point scale.

Frequently asked questions

What is the EU Union of Skills?

It is a European Commission strategy launched on 5 March 2025 to close Europe's skills gaps and boost competitiveness. It organises around building skills for quality jobs, upskilling and reskilling the workforce, circulating skills across the EU, and attracting talent, supported by a European Skills High-Level Board and a Skills Intelligence Observatory.

Why does the Union of Skills matter for course and programme evaluation?

Because it makes demonstrable graduate skills the yardstick of higher education's value. Evaluation that only measures student satisfaction is not instrumented to evidence skills, so institutions face growing pressure to evaluate what students can actually do at programme level.

Can course evaluation measure graduate employability?

Not directly. Employability is shaped by the economy, individual circumstances and factors outside a programme's control. Evaluation can credibly measure the proximal skill-building a programme is responsible for, which is what employability draws on — but claiming a survey "measures employability" overreaches.

How can a programme make feedback comparable to labour-market data?

By mapping evaluation to a shared skills vocabulary such as the EU's ESCO classification, which links what programmes teach to occupations and skills employers demand, making student feedback legible alongside labour-market intelligence.

Does focusing on skills undermine the broader purpose of a university?

It does not have to. The defensible approach is to evidence skills alongside — not instead of — the knowledge, critical thinking and public-good outcomes universities also produce, and to be explicit about what each measure does and does not capture.