The 2026 Social Affairs Forum in Gijon will focus on Bridging generations: Cities driving inclusive work and skills for all. The Forum will explore how cities can shape the future of work to be inclusive, sustainable, and family-friendly, ensuring that all residents can access opportunities and thrive in changing labour markets. Rapid technological change, demographic transitions, and new social expectations are reshaping the labour market. Cities must adapt by supporting parents to balance work and family life, creating opportunities for workers of all ages, gender or socioeconomic backgrounds, tackling workplace exclusion, and ensuring that vulnerable groups can access lifelong education, training and employment pathways.

Discussions will highlight how employment and skills policies can address social inclusion at every stage of life:

• Cities as employers (Union of Skills): Addressing staff shortages, talent attraction and enhancing the attractiveness of public sector work.
• Working-age adults: Advancing fair employment with adequate wages, ensuring diversity and inclusion at the workplace, enabling good work-life balance, through affordable and accessible childcare and family-friendly, gender-responsive employment policies, with a focus on single parents. This includes ensuring access to training and upskilling opportunities within jobs, particularly for workers with caring responsibilities.
• Young people: Ensuring access to training, upskilling and reskilling pathways, as well as entry-level job opportunities and fair and quality internships, while addressing the growing difficulties young people face when entering the labour market. This also includes second-chance education and training for adults who left education early.
• Anti-poverty strategies and tackling in-work poverty: A cross-cutting policy priority underpinning all the above areas and particularly acute in urban contexts. It requires coordinated action across services, including employment, skills recognition, wage-setting, access to affordable housing, skills development and social protection policies, as well as access to affordable, quality care services. Addressing in-work poverty also means recognising the role of paid and unpaid care work in shaping labour market participation and career progression, particularly for women and people with a migration background, and taking into account its intersection with multiple vulnerabilities.

Against Gijon’s tradition of innovation, social inclusion, and community engagement, the Forum will combine keynotes, co-creation workshops, site visits, and networking opportunities to co-design pathways for an inclusive future of work in Europe.

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Call for contributions: good practices and challenges

As a part of the Social Affairs Forum 2026, cities are invited to submit their contributions for the parallel workshops. In line with the focus of the Forum ’Bridging generations: Cities driving inclusive work and skills for all’, the selected topics explore how cities can shape the future of work to be inclusive, sustainable, and family-friendly, ensuring that all residents can access opportunities and thrive in changing labour markets. 

If your city is interested in this opportunity, please read more here.

Deadline to apply: 16 March 2026