Background

Labour mobility is an EU fundamental freedom reflected in Article 45 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), yet professionals who move across borders often encounter slow, complex and inconsistent procedures to have their qualifications recognised.

Under the treaties, education remains primarily a Member State competence. Articles 165 and 166 of the TFEU allow the EU to support and supplement national action while respecting their competencies and internal organisation of education and training systems. However, the cross-border recognition of qualifications falls under internal market rules, governed by the Professional Qualifications Directive 2005/36/EC (PQD).

The PQD allows EU professionals to access regulated professions in other Member State through three routes: automatic recognition for seven harmonised professions (i.e. doctors, nurses, pharmacists and architects); recognition based on professional experience, mainly used in craft and trade sectors (i.e. electricians and plumbers); and the general system, applied case-by-case. Over 5 700 professions are currently regulated across the EU, covering around 22 % of the workforce. Modernised in 2013 with the introduction of the European professional card, the directive has nonetheless left persistent gaps and third-country nationals fall entirely outside its scope. For the latter, a non-binding Commission recommendation issued in 2023 aimed to align national procedures, but recognition for non-EU citizens remains fragmented in practice.

Alongside the Professional Qualifications Directive, several non-binding tools exist to improve transparency of skills in the EU: the European Qualifications Framework (EQF), which maps qualification levels across Member States; Europass, to help workers document their skills and qualifications; European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO), a shared classification of occupations and competences; and EURES (EURopean Employment Services), the EU's cross-border job portal. However, their implementation remains uneven.

In 2024, two influential reports gave renewed political momentum to deeper reform of how qualifications circulate in the EU. Both the Enrico Letta and Mario Draghi reports identified persistent barriers to skills mobility as a challenge to EU competitiveness. Draghi's analysis went further, stressing that qualifications must be easily understandable across borders to maximise the return on skills investment and improve workers' employability. It also identified skills shortages as a direct obstacle to innovation and economic growth. That year, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made skills and fair mobility a central priority in her 2024-2029 political guidelines.

Building on this, the European Commission adopted the Union of Skills in 2025 as the overarching skills and mobility strategy, announcing the skills portability initiative (SPI) as one of its central deliverables. The SPI is expected to be published in the third quarter of 2026, as part of the fair labour mobility package.

European Commission

The Commission has monitored the implementation of the Professional Qualifications Directive through three successive reports (2011, 2020, and most recently 2026). The latest report confirms the system continues to support high mobility, with nearly 185 000 recognition applications processed between 2020 and 2024, and more than 83 % resulting in a positive outcome, allowing these professionals to pursue their careers abroad. Nevertheless, it also exposes a frustrating reality for many users: while automatic recognition for sectors like healthcare is efficient, the general system remains slow, paper-heavy, and inconsistent. This friction often leads to skills waste, where qualified workers are forced into roles that do not match their expertise.

The 2026 report also identifies limited digitalisation of procedures, incomplete information for applicants, significant underuse of the European professional card, and the absence of a common training framework to date. Together, all these findings underpin the skills portability initiative.

The Commission launched a public consultation between December 2025 and February 2026. The results provide a clear political mandate for EU intervention: 67 % of respondents identified current recognition processes as a major barrier because they are too long and expensive. Furthermore, 94 % of participants believe the EU must act to ensure qualifications are understood uniformly across the single market.

In preparing the initiative, the Commission outlines three interrelated potential actions: a legislative proposal to strengthen the transparency and comparability of qualifications, including through EU-wide interoperable digital credentials; measures to modernise and expand recognition procedures for regulated professions; and common EU rules to simplify the recognition of qualifications held by third-country nationals.

European Parliament

The European Parliament has engaged consistently with qualification recognition and labour mobility across successive terms. In a January 2018 resolution, Parliament stressed the importance of regulated professions for the EU economy and called for reform to address differences in national regulatory frameworks. The following year, at the request of the Employment and Social Affairs Committee (EMPL), a dedicated study assessed the impact of the 2013 Professional Qualifications Directive revision on labour mobility, identifying persistent administrative burden, high costs and information gaps.

In 2021, Parliament adopted two resolutions, on intra-EU mobility and legal migration, underlining the need for improvement to mutual recognition mechanisms, ongoing shortcomings in the protection of mobile workers, and the need to establish common rules for the recognition of third-country nationals' qualifications, noting the absence of a framework. In another resolution marking the 30th anniversary of the single market, Parliament urged the Commission to enforce EU recognition rules more strictly, including through infringement procedures against non-compliant Member States. Between 2020 and 2025, the Commission opened 30 new infringement procedures affecting 22 EU countries.

Parliament's most recent position, set out in a 2025 resolution on internal market rules, pointed to the recognition  processes' inability to keep pace with labour market needs, by calling for faster, sector-tailored approaches given the real cost of recognition failures for workers and employers.