National Reforms related to Transversal Skills and Employability

2020

The Norwegian skills reform Learning throughout Life (“Lære hele livet”) has two goals:

• All Norwegian employees should have up-to-date skills.
• The Norwegian working life should have a supply of the skills it needs. 

Making access to educational loans more available to adult students, a public, free online career service, and legal regulation of the counties’ duty to offer career guidance and are among the measures in the reform. To improve the system of further education and training for working life and make it more flexible, the Government has allocated funding for sectorial programs and flexible further education for employees. 

To cope with the Covid 19 situation, the Norwegian Government has made it possible for unemployed and persons who are dismissed to participate in formal education. The Government has allocated funding to already existing education programs:

• Sectorial programmes (“Bransjeprogrammene”)
• Web-based further education at all further education levels
• Apprenticeship Certificate at work (“Fagbrev på jobb”)
• Extension of the part of the SkillsPlus program that offers upper secondary provision combined with basic skills for employees (“KompetansePluss fagopplæring”)
• Modularized adult upper secondary education (“Modulisert fag- og yrkesopplæring”)

2019

Improved national cybersecurity competence

Competence and knowledge about threats, vulnerable areas, and effective measures are a precondition for the ability to protect digital systems against cyber incidents. The National Cyber Security Strategy for Norway defines competence as one of five strategic goals.

The National Strategy for Cyber Security Competence (2019) (in Norwegian only) elaborates the competence goals in the strategy. The goal is to improve cybersecurity competence in accordance with the needs of society. The strategy sets out conditions for long-term competence building, encompassing national capacity in the fields of research, development, education, and measures designed to raise awareness in the business community and among the general public. It is important to have sufficient national specialist expertise. To meet this demand, capacity in ICT-related education programs, including digital security, has been increased by 1500. Further, resources (37 MNOK for the year 2019) have been allocated to develop flexible programs for further education within digital competence.

Skills reform

The Norwegian government is developing a skills reform and will present a white paper to the Parliament in 2020. The goal is to promote learning throughout life and to provide workers with updated skills.

The skills reform will focus on establishing a flexible system for skills development and create more learning opportunities for workers. Measures will be introduced to stimulate the development of flexible modules that can be combined with full-time or close to full-time work. So far the government has launched two new initiatives, in addition to expanding existing initiatives

• A sector/industry program for training developed in cooperation with the social partners
• Funding for the development of short, flexible courses for digital skills

2018

There have been no reforms to date in this area.