From Skills Shortages to Strategic Autonomy: The Political Economy of the EU’s Union of Skills

As the European Union seeks strategic autonomy in a contested global environment, skills governance has emerged as a critical dimension of its geopolitical turn. The EU’s ambition to reduce dependency on external actors and strengthen its industrial base intersects with the urgent need to address skills shortages and demographic decline. In this context, European countries are deploying skills policies to support large manufacturing sectors with a highly skilled workforce, applying an 'industrial policy' logic to skills development (Durazzi, Emmenegger & Felder-Stindt, 2025). This approach creates transnational spaces for the movement of skills, despite the national roots of education and training policies (Ivardi & Wanklin, 2025). While scholarship has traditionally focused on the national politics underpinning 'transnational skills ecosystems', this paper shifts the lens to the European Union (EU), where such an industrial policy approach has gained significant traction. We examine the recent launch of the Union of Skills and its flagship instruments and ask: what are the European politics of transnational skills policies, and how do they relate to the EU’s quest for strategic autonomy? Drawing on supranational governance theory and comparative political economy, we critically analyse the Union of Skills through document analysis and expert interviews. Our investigation focuses on two fault lines: first, between countries on the periphery that experience brain drain as core countries poach skills; and second, between employers in need of skilled labour and workers' representatives concerned about wages and working conditions. These tensions reveal how the EU’s industrial policy logic both enables and constrains integration in the skills domain. We hypothesise that two factors helped the Union of Skills mitigate these divisions: (1) its timing, at a critical juncture following the post-Covid-19 pandemic, when resilience and competitiveness became central to EU discourse; and (2) its alignment with the EU’s broader geopolitical turn, which reframed skills policy as a strategic resource for industrial sovereignty. By situating skills governance within debates on strategic autonomy, this paper contributes to understanding how the EU adapts its traditional regulatory power to maintain resilience in a rapidly shifting global order where migration, technological sovereignty, and industrial competitiveness intersect. In doing so, we argue that skills governance is not merely a social or labour market issue but a cornerstone of the EU’s evolving role as a global actor.