The impetus for the report is to inform and to contribute to the Department’s Skills Strategy by monitoring our performance against competitor countries and to assess if our policies are sufficient to improve our skills base. While it is important for Northern Ireland to look domestically at its skills record, as it is doing by monitoring progress against ‘Success through Skills’, Northern Ireland must also look externally by assessing its skills base in an international context.
This report benchmarks Northern Ireland’s skills base against a number of international economies for a range of indicators for which comparable data is available.