MEP Victor Negrescu, Vice-Chair of the European Parliament’s Committee on Culture and Education (CULT), addressed a question to the European Commission earlier this month on how it intended to ensure the right to training for all citizens and to what extent it supported the issue of an electronic training voucher to all citizens for inclusion in their future e-skills portfolio.

In his address to the European executive, he recalled that the European Union had set the objective of increasing the level of skills of European citizens in the process of transforming the economy, with the aim of increasing investment in training in order to create a more inclusive and efficient framework at European level.

At the same time, the Vice-President of the CULT Committee pointed out that, unfortunately, statistics showed worrying inequalities between Member States in terms of access to training on the labour market.

In this regard, Victor Negrescu cited the example of Romania, where in 2020, only 17.5% of companies had organised a form of vocational training, while in Latvia, the percentage was 96.8%. As regards participation in training courses, the Social Democrat MEP pointed out that in 2021, only 4.9% of adults in Romania had participated in training courses, while in Sweden the percentage had been at 34.7% and the European average at 10.8%.