News

The e-Skills Match team is proud to announce the publication of the project’s first article in a high-impact journal!

Project partners Luis Fernández-Sanz, Josefa Gómez-Pérez and Ana Castillo-Martínez published an article titled “e-Skills Match: A framework for mapping and integrating the main skills, knowledge and competence standards and models for ICT occupations”. It is part of a scientific journal named “Computer Standards & Interfaces” ranked as Q2 in the world prestigious ranking of JCR by ISI and it’s featured in the 51st volume.

The article defines the ways in which the e-Skills Match Framework will function. Specifically, it will enable the development of future support systems which may provide self-assessment functions for job candidates, recommender modules to guide their training to target occupations and the possibility of knowledge validation options aligned to the specific set of skills, knowledge and competences used as basic elements of the model.

You can read more on this topic here

or You could read the free pre-print version here

On the 21^st of December 2016 our project partners from eGovlab successfully hosted a usability workshop with experts in the field. In total 8 people participated and provided their input.

The workshop started with an introduction to the e-Skills Match project and a presentation on the e-Skills Match demo followed. The participants had the opportunity to get familiarized with the demo website by opening it on their own laptops. Later on, three exercises were conducted on the e-Skills Match demo.

The objectives of the workshop were: a) to understand the user experience & identify shortcomings and b) to Map the user journey.

In the past, if you wanted to get a qualification, or even simply learn something new, you would sign up for a course at a bricks-and-mortar institution, pay any relevant fees, and then physically attend class. That was until the online learning revolution started.

Last year, the e-learning market was worth an enormous $166.5 billion. It’s been estimated that this will grow to $255 billion by 2017. Its growing financial value is matched only by the swelling numbers of students choosing to follow an online course.

In the latest Global Shapers Survey of 25,000 young people from across the world, 77.84% of respondents reported having taken online courses in the past. So is online learning the future of education?

Read the full article

Date: 27 September 2016
Location: Brussels

The smartphone, along with its cousin, the tablet, and a fast-expanding family of “wearables” and other “smart” devices are transforming the way people live, work, play, connect, and interact around the world. In the process, they are converting the digital revolution into an increasingly mobile phenomenon. Innovation in the tech sector are unleashing invention in countless other areas as consumers adopt new behavioral patterns and businesses find ways to improve efficiency, develop new products and services, and expand their market reach. Only recently, the Progressive Policy Institute found that the European App Economy includes 1.64 million jobs as of January 2016 and already in 2013, the mobile economy generated more than 90 billion euros. In other words, Europe’s app economy is doing extremely well’.

This workshop will discuss how this impressive track-record contributes to growth and jobs. Among issues worth debating: how the app-economy enhances creativity and productivity across the board; why is Europe so successful in this respect; how can the EU support the mobile economy; what are the regulatory facing app developers; the role of platforms.

The set of distinguished experts below have accepted to lend their expertise and start a conversation, we hope you will be able to join and nurture.

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An interesting article by Futurist Thomas Frey focusing on many of the future jobs within these industries that currently don’t exist.

"Last week I was speaking at an event in Istanbul. As usual, once I landed at the airport, I made my way to the customs area where I was greeted by no fewer than 1,000 people in line ahead of me.

Long lines in airport customs is not unusual. But as I waded through this 45-minute process I couldn’t help but do some mental calculations surrounding the massive waste of human capital throughout this whole process. Since there were two separate customs areas at the Istanbul airport, my rough calculations came out to well over 10 million man-hours a year wasted at this one single airport.

It’s not unusual for governments to waste people’s time over what they like to phrase as “the greater good.” However, this entire security process will eventually be automated down to a fraction of the time it takes today, eliminating the need for over 90% of all customs agents.

The same goes for TSA-like security agents on the front end of airports. Within the next decade, 90% of those jobs will be gone as well. All of them, automated out of existence."

Read the full article here