About

Background supporting the action

Transversal skills, including digital, entrepreneurship, and linguistic amongst others, are vitally important for the employability and adaptability of the European citizen. While job-distinct skills and competences are relevant for jobs in specific occupations or economic sectors transversal skills and competences can be applied in a large variety of jobs.

The penetration of ICT in a variety of economic activities is not only cutting across sectors, but also, across different types of jobs. The “Opening Up Education” Communication says that 90% jobs require IT skills today. Thus, the e-Skills and digital competence are clearly transversal skills and competences needed for any individual to be a marketable and attractive participant in the European workforce. Employers are not solely interested in a candidate’s academic or vocational qualification but also on additional transversal skills and competences. Individuals need to better comprehend the e-Skills and digital competences necessary for gaining that extra edge for employment security in the new economy while also enhancing their training when necessary.

There is broad consensus about the crucial importance of e-skills for Europe. The “Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs” launched on 4 March 2013 at the European conference on “e-Skills and Education for Digital Jobs” in Brussels is aimed to facilitate action towards enhanced digital skills at national, regional or local level in EU countries.The EU goals for the period 2014-2020 is the promotion of ICT professionalism and the generation of a larger talent pool of entrepreneurs, business leaders, managers and advanced users with a focus on the strategic use of new information and communication technologies.

Current analysis has shown that the level of career websites’ interoperability across Europe is very low. Although there is comprehensive coverage of e-Skills development and career support, individual portals provide only partial information. Users have to shift from one service to another in order to seek an integrated pathway for career development. In the ideal scenario individuals interested in ICT skills and digital competence information should be connected to further related information such as certifications/qualifications, assessment services, educational guidance services.

Objectives

The projects’ General Objective is to develop and demonstrate a European-wide learning technology system, dynamically adapted to changes occurring in job labor market classifications that will support (re)- training for acquiring the necessary e-Skills and digital competences to access the desirable jobs within the ICT sector.
The project will develop a system that classifies ICT skills and digital competences achieved through formal, non-formal and informal learning and enable them to be related to qualifications, occupation in the ICT sector and to open learning and training systems that provide these skills and competences.

Its specific objectives are the following:

O1. To identify relevant OER and MOCCs for e-Skills training, assess their quality and define the knowledge and skills acquired through consultation with stakeholders.

O2. To develop the e-Skills Match system prototype that supports each individual to make informed decisions regarding his/her learning path required for particular occupations and to validate the acquired knowledge.

O3. To test and visualise the e-Skills Match system prototype at EU level, with specific focus on four EU countries (Greece, Italy, Spain and Sweden).

e-Skills Match will allow individuals to create and manage their e-Portofolio, perform an e-Skills audit in order to analyse their e-skills and digital competences, to self-assess their position in the labour environment and to plan learning pathways for complementing occupational e-skills, or in some cases to prepare for the validation through academic course providers of non-formal or informal learning outcomes.

The project will investigate the development and deployment of the e-Skills Match web-based multilingual platform for knowledge networking related to e-Skills and digital competences demand and supply in different sectors of the ICT activity.

Target groups

e-Skills Match addresses to:

• ICT professionals or young people, to assess and visualize their skills, identify possible learning / training / qualification paths to enhance them or fill some skill-gaps;
• VET and higher education institutions interested in promoting their offer relating it to the e-Competences and ICT job profiles included in the e-Skills Match platform;
• The certification providers, interested in certifying the ICT professionals' e-competences;
• Whoever intends to learn about the current e-competence offer, in terms of training, certifications and "skilled labour.

e-Skills Match will also foster the creation of an e-Skills Match community made of the Certified ICT professionals and the demand side. Some functionalities will concern the employers in different sectors of economic activity and the training and education providers, such as:

• Employers will be able to submit their demand for ICT competences - occupational information related to the e-Skills and digital competences required for a specific occupation within the ICT sector;
• Training and education providers will be able to submit their offers for ICT training, including OER.

Services for users

The e-Skills Match technological platform will offer online services to European citizens and in particular those who are faced with unemployment or seek new careers or new job direction within their career path.  Interested individuals will be able to register to the platform, create and manage their e-Skills profile by describing their current e-Skills and qualifications and provide evidence of such. Consequently, registered users will have access to  the following services:

Detect e-Skills and digital competences required in different ICT occupations;

Create their e-Portfolio - an electronic collection of evidence of learning gathered over time and reflecting learner journey that can serve as an electronic resume;

Knowledge elicitation and representation - Mapping of current e-Skills and levels of digital competences visualized on a Career Concept Map.

Perform e-Skills audits in order to identify the individual’s e-skills gaps.

In a nutshell the project’s platform will aim to integrate the following services:

• e-Competences self-assessment with the related outcomes formalized by graphs;
• e-Competence / job profile training resources available, including OER (Open Education Resources) and MOOCS (Massive Open On-line Courses), as well as market certifications;
• e-Competence certifications through academic course providers based on validation procedures recognized at European level.