In the knowledge society the idea itself of education and training is changing. The challenge to the innovation-development-growth-education virtuous circle highlights the need to prepare people to enter a dynamic and continuously changing model of society and an extremely flexible labor market demanding new professional skills, new profiles and the retraining of traditional professional profiles. Education should reach diversified mass users even in terms of age.

It is no longer possible to acquire professional skills valid for one’s all lifetime. This involves developing the skills to able to participate in a continuous learning process, often achieved in self-learning contexts aimed at developing field-specific skills as well as higher cognitive skills (aptitudes to reasoning, to problem-solving and actionplanning) and social abilities (autonomy, communication and cooperation skills).

In this new setting the basic skills that people have to acquire mainly deal with the capacity to manage information, transform it into competencies and implement it to operate in the new technology-enhanced economic setting. These abilities are the skills required to workers as a result of the impact of the new information and communication technologies on the nature of work. They are the competencies of the knowledge society that will ever-increasingly affect production factors.