Milan Zver was born on 25 May 1962 in Ljubljana. He attended primary school in Destrnik and high school in Ptuj. In 1982, he enrolled in the Faculty of Sociology, Political Sciences and Journalism at the University of Ljubljana. He graduated in 1987, then enrolled in a master’s course and was employed as a junior researcher at the same Faculty. In 1989, he did a three month research course on the history of political thought at the Karl-Franzens University in Graz, Austria, where he also wrote most of his master’s dissertation, successfully defending it in 1990. In 1992, he took a break from academic research work and started working for the Government of the Republic of Slovenia, although he partially pursued his academic career by teaching ‘the History of Slovenian Political Thought’. From 1994 to 1999, he worked at the Municipality of Ljubljana, mainly as Secretary of the City Council. Following that, he held the post of associate expert at the National Assembly for a few months. In 1998, he completed his doctoral thesis at the Faculty of Social Sciences and qualified as a university teacher for social sciences in June. Later that year, he began lecturing and was in fact the head teacher for sociology on both higher and university education programmes at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Maribor. He has also actively participated at several meetings of political scientists (Slovenian Days of Political Science, held annually in Portorož and organised by the Slovenian Political Science Society in association with the Faculty of Social Sciences; the 2002 EIBE Conference in Athens) as well as other expert meetings (in Sofia, Tallinn, Prague, Zagreb) which were organized by various foundations (the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the International Republican Institute, the Konrad Adenauer Foundaiton).

He was also invited to become a lecturer of sociology at the newly founded Faculty of Criminal Justice and Security in Ljubljana (at the University of Maribor). In 2002, he published a monograph entitledDemokracija v klasični slovenski politični misli (‘Democracy in Traditional Slovenian Political Thought’). He has written many scholarly papers published for the Slovenian and foreign academic press. The year 1998 saw the publication of a collection of papers and essays entitled Človekove pravice in svoboščine v tranziciji: primer Slovenija (‘Human Rights and Freedoms in Transition: the Case of Slovenia’. He was also the editor of the collection entitled Pučnikova znanstvena in politična misel (‘Pučnik's Scientific and Political Thought’), which was published in 2004. In 2009 he published a publication entitled Dvajset pomladi SDS(Twenty springs of SDS), in which he explains the development of Slovenian democratic party.

Throughout this time he has been active in professional, public and political life. He is the president of the Ivan Cankar Society, a member of the board of directors of the Vrtnica (‘Rose’) Humanitarian Organisation, and he has also been a member of the Executive Committee of the Slovenian Political Science Society. In the 1990's, he was a government advisor, a local councilor, and later on a national councilor. In the year 2004, he was elected deputy to the National Assembly, and in between 2004 and 2008 he was Minister of Education and Sports. In the first half of 2008, the time of Slovene presidency of European Union, he was therefore the president of The Council of European Union for Education, Youth and Culture.

In his capacity as president of the Council he led or participated in many conferences, i.e. European Conference on Roma Education in Bratislava (2008), European Roma Roundtable in Budapest (2008), Quality in mobility within the Lifelong Learning Programme in Ljubljana (2008), Conference Dialog and Respect in Oslo (2008), Promoting creativity and innovation in Brdo (2008), Promoting multilingualism: a shared commitment in Brussels (2008), Practice oriented vocational education and training – the key to a competitive Europe Conference in Berlin(2008)  and at the Conference of the European Ministers of Education in Heidelberg entitled Europe – its values – its futurewhich was organized by the German Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture (2007).

In 2009 he was elected to the European Parliament and became a member of the Parliamentary Committee for Culture and Education and a substitute member of the Agriculture and Rural development Committee. In 2010 he was nominated for the European Parliament's "rapportuer" for the Youth on the Move dossier - a framework for improving Europe's education and training systems - initially one of the 7 flagship initiatives of Barroso's EU 2020 strategy.

Milan Zver is communicating in English, German and Croatian, and has a basic knowledge of French.