eSkills
Filling the gaps: e-skills and education for digital jobs
On the occasion of the European conference "Filling the gaps: e-Skills and Education for Digital Jobs", the Commission is planning the launch of a Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs.
- Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission in charge of the Digital Agenda for Europe
- Antonio Tajani, Vice President of the European Commission in charge of Industry and Entrepreneurship
- Androulla Vassiliou, Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth
- Laszlo Andor, Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion.
The Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs is an EU wide multi-stakeholder partnership seeking to address the shortfall in the number of professionals with the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) skills that are highly demanded by the industry. The goal is to increase the supply of ICT professionals by 2015, so as to ensure a sufficient number of them in Europe by 2020. In order to achieve this, the European Commission is offering to forces with industry associations and is inviting Member States, regions and concerned stakeholders (from industry, education, public employment services, various national platforms and others) to engage in this partnership.
New technologies in education
As a part of the project “A web portal for teaching about European Integration”, a cycle of seminars about ICT in education will be hold at the Blau Museum (Barcelona) from 18th to 22nd February 2013 under the title “New technologies in education”.
Registration at: http://europeineducation.eu/
As a part of the project “A web portal for teaching about European Integration”, a cycle of seminars about ICT in education will be hold at the Blau Museum (Barcelona) from 18th to 22nd February 2013 under the title “New technologies in education”.
Registration at: http://europeineducation.eu/
The University of Lleida is leading this partnership in collaboration with the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) and professionals from other educational institutions.
The project receives funding from the Jean Monnet Programme (Lifelong Learning Programme) of the European Union. Our goal is that of developing a web platform addressed to secondary level students about European Integration. We focus in the three main aspects related with European Integration teaching: History, Economics and Geography.
This event is in English and Catalan.
New skills and jobs in Europe
The Europe 2020 employment strategy, and in particular its initiative "An agenda for new skills and jobs", aims to support the full employment goal of the Lisbon Treaty. In a context of growing challenges for employment policies in Europe, this report questions current approaches and calls for increased policy learning amongst EU Member States.
The report argues that there is room for improvement in employment in Europe and emphasizes the importance of improving access to education, developing more transversal skills and balancing job security and flexibility.
Commission issues action call in Davos to close digital skills and jobs gap in Europe
Commission issues action call in Davos - with IT sector and telecoms companies - to close digital skills and jobs gap in Europe
Europe faces up to 700.000 unfilled ICT jobs and declining competitiveness. The number of digital jobs is growing – by 3% each year during the crisis – but the number of new ICT graduates and other skilled ICT workers is shrinking. Our youth need actions not words, and companies operating in Europe need the right people or they will move operations elsewhere.
Today, the Commission is issuing a call to action to companies, governments, educators, social partners, employment service providers and civil society to join us in a massive effort to "turn the tide". Young Europeans should have the tools to enter digital careers or to create jobs as entrepreneurs.
European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes said: "The digital skills gap is growing, like our unemployment queues. We need joint action between governments and companies to bridge that gap. The ICT sector is the new backbone of Europe's economy, and together we can prevent a lost generation and an uncompetitive Europe. So I am expecting concrete pledges by companies, everyone I meet will be getting the same request. The Commission will do its bit but we can't do it alone – companies, social partners and education players – including at national and regional level - have to stand with us."
The Commission will collect pledges on new jobs, internships, training places, start-up funding, free online university courses and more. Companies such as Nokia, Telefónica, SAP, Cisco, HP, Alcatel-Lucent, Randstad, ENI, Telenor Group, ARM, as well as the CIO community, CEPIS (Council of European Professional Informatics Societies) and Digital Europe are in the first wave of those committing to act. On 4-5 March the Commission will include pledges received from partners and build them into the launch of a Grand Coalition for Digital Skills and Jobs at a major pledging conference. The conference is open to all who want to actively support this common cause.
We seek active collaboration in areas like industry-led training, assisting labour mobility, certifying skills, improving school and university curricula, raising awareness, and creating an entrepreneur friendly environment for start-ups.
One concrete area for action could be training vouchers. Successful German and Spanish voucher based training models provided jobs for 60-70% of the 20,000 participants and we should seek to replicate and scale up this idea on a European scale.
Other key elements of the Coalition will include mobility assistance. Such assistance is likely to range from English language learning support to facilitating mobility for unemployed persons and standardised certification of skills, via a transformed eCompetence Framework available in all 23 official languages of the EU.
In recognition of the job creation potential of web start-ups, the Commission is also launching Startup Europe, a single platform for tools and programmes supporting people wanting to set up and grow web start-ups in Europe.
For more information
Hashtag: #digitalskills
IADIS International Conference e-Learning 2013
The IADIS e-Learning 2013 conference aims to address the main issues of concern within e-Learning. This conference covers both technical as well as the non-technical aspects of e-Learning.
The conference accepts submissions in the following seven main areas: Organisational Strategy and Management Issues; Technological Issues; e-Learning Curriculum Development Issues; Instructional Design Issues; e-Learning Delivery Issues; e-Learning Research Methods and Approaches; e-Skills and Information Literacy for Learning.
Selected authors of best papers will be invited to submit extended versions of their papers to selected journals.
Submit your paper here (submissions until 28 January 2013).
European Conference: Towards a European Quality label for ICT industry training and certifications
Since the financial crisis began to hit labour markets in 2008, Europe has lost more than 5.6 million jobs. In its Communication “Towards a job-rich recovery” the European Commission states that “recovering this lost ground is only possible if the EU returns to sustained economic growth, which in turn requires European industries and services to retain or regain international competitiveness. In this respect, the capability of industry and services to compete and evolve is becoming increasingly dependent on the innovative and effective use of information and communication technologies (ICT).
Despite high levels of unemployment, ICT skills shortages have been identified. The mismatch between skills available and the needs of the labour markets concern all Member States, but affect them to varying degrees. Remarkably the demand for ICT practitioners continues to grow by around 3% a year, with labour demand outstripping the supply. Depending on the scenario to become reality there could be up to several 100,000 vacancies by 2015 unless more is done to direct more young people into computing degrees and retrain unemployed people.
In this context industry-based training and certification is part of the solution to reduce skills shortages and mismatches and thereby unemployment in general. However, we are currently faced with some strong inhibitors and constraints to make this happen. Starting a career as ICT practitioner or advancing a career towards those areas of highest demand is constrained by the fact that the ICT certification world remains un-transparent with thousands of different certificates, ranging from technical ones (almost every ICT provider offers some), those offered by foundations in information management to high end certificates. Moreover they seem to live in a parallel universe to that of vocational and higher education.
The lack of transparency and quality labelling is a challenge to human resources departments in their (cross-border) recruitment processes and curricula developers interested in providing side entries for interested individuals and organisations, but most of all to small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) searching for talent and very importantly also to ICT practitioners currently lacking orientation and guidance in deciding on and taking their next career step.
Progress towards solutions
Several European initiatives, involving in particular the CEN Workshop on ICT Skills, have been trying to address this issue by developing standards for competences (European e-Competence Framework) and ICT job profiles. The results of the project to be presented at this conference constitute a further step towards guidance and orientation through the certification world. Using the European e-Competence Framework it developed a European e-skills quality label, services and tools to foster transparency and guidance towards quality in the market of industry-based training and certification as it
- Provides means to distinguish different types of certification and training (by quality labels and industry-based certification and training courses against the e-Competence Framework),
- Collected and disseminated empirical information and evidence about demand and supply of e-skills in Europe to provide interested parties with an overview of areas with high demand for e-skills to better match e-skills demand and supply,
- Provides a service and tool for focused further development and certification of one’s own e-skills or those of staff members to support better job placement and recruitment in companies. For this purpose a prototype of an online landscape, self-assessment tool and web portal is offered to stakeholders interested in the further development and enhancement of the prototype towards a fully-fledged service for operation in the job placement, recruitment, e-skills further development and certification market.
At the conference leading stakeholders will discuss how industry-based training and certification can contribute to reduce ICT skills shortages and unemployment. Solutions for achieving greater clarity and orientation support through the ICT education and training landscape together with latest data on ICT skills demand and supply developments and forecasts (2012 – 2020) will be presented. Possible interactions with employment agencies and recruitment / staffing industry will be shown.
A proposal for a pan-European quality label together with criteria, processes and structures for ICT industry training and certification will be presented. The first prototype of an online support tool for ICT practitioners and stakeholders such as human resources managers will be demonstrated. These will allow stakeholders to better anticipate e-skills needs in EU labour markets and put them in a position to swiftly act upon. Recommendations for actions and governance will mark the end of the conference.
Commission launches EU Skills Panorama to tackle skills mismatches
The European Commission launched the EU Skills Panorama, a website presenting quantitative and qualitative information on short- and medium-term skills needs, skills supply and skills mismatches.
The Panorama, drawing on data and forecasts compiled at EU and Member State level, will highlight the fastest growing occupations as well as the top 'bottleneck' occupations with high numbers of unfilled vacancies. Currently, there are around 2 million job vacancies across the EU despite high levels of unemployment. The website contains detailed information sector by sector, profession by profession and country by country.
The Skills Panorama shows that the occupations with the most unfilled vacancies in the EU today are those of finance and sales professionals. Other shortages most frequently reported concern biologists, pharmacologists, medical doctors and related professionals, nurses, ICT computing professionals and engineers.
The website indicates that the strongest mismatch between skills and labour market needs exists in Lithuania, Bulgaria, Belgium, Hungary and Ireland, whereas in Portugal, Denmark and the Netherlands the situation is much better.
The EU Skills Panorama will be regularly updated with the latest data.
10th Safer Internet Day
The Insafe network is pleased to announce that the theme for the 10th Safer Internet Day will be online rights and responsibilities. The campaign will take place worldwide on Tuesday 5 February 2013. As in previous years, members of the public, schools, NGOs, industry and other stakeholders are all invited to take part.
Continuing on from the success of the 2012 campaign, the Insafe network is working on a second SID kit for schools that will mark this anniversary edition of the campaign. As in previous years, the Insafe network will also release, later this year, a campaign video specific to the 2013 theme along with other resources. In the meantime you can view the SID Generic Video.
About Online Rights and Responsibilities
The Insafe Network is currently preparing the campaign information for SID 2013. We can, however, confirm that the slogan will be 'connect with respect'. As soon as more information is available it will be added to this page.
Want to know how to take part in SID?
You can spread the word by attending or organising an event! You can register for Safer Internet Day by completing the online form. There are three types of registrations available: for schools, for individuals, and for organisations. All registered schools will also receive a digital copy of the SID Kit for schools once it becomes available. Once you've registered Insafe will contact you; if you reside in one of our network countries, this contact will be from your National Awareness Centre.
No national contact point? They why not set up a SID Committee in your country! Contact the SID helpdesk at SID-helpdesk@eun.org to create your own.
Now you're ready to organise your event. You can use the resources on this page to help you.
Looking for ideas?
Look at some of our previous actions for inspiration:
- Post our banner (coming soon) / publish our press release on your website (due for publication end of 2012)
- Follow our Facebook and Twitter campagin pages, or view SID videos past and present on our YouTube accounts (Insafe / Pan-EU Youth)
- Spread the word through the media.
- Host an event such as a conference on online safety in your community.
- Arrange workshops in schools and private companies.
- Orchestrate debates between young people and policy-makers.
Don’t forget to keep your National Awareness Centre or SID Committee informed so that they can valorise your action.