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e-Skills Match (www.eskillsmatch.eu) is an EU co-funded project aiming to develop and demonstrate a European-wide learning system that will dynamically adapt to the changes that are occurring to current job market classifications and will support the user to identify any potential lack of necessary e-Skills and digital competences, while it will offer him the tools and methods to gain (re-) training in order to become more competitive and access the desirable jobs within ICT or non-ICT sectors.

Towards these objectives, the project will design, develop and deploy the e-Skills Match platform, a web-based multilingual platform which will offer an e-Portfolio solution hosted in a cloud environment. The platform will be tested by real users and will allow them to assess their current knowledge against e-Skills and digital competences demanded by the job market.

The Newsletter Issue has been published in June 2016 and has been posted on Joinup!
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Following last year’s successful pilot, the French city of Grenoble is this year moving 8 more schools to a complete free and open source stack. France’s 16th largest city, is using Linux for PCs, laptops and servers. The city intends to have switched all schools at the end of 2018.

The switch to free software allows the city to support a wide range of computer hardware, said Grenoble’s assistant mayor Laurence Comparat. “And we have all kinds: new ones, old ones, mobile ones, laptops, and even home-built from spare parts.”

Ms Comparat talked about the project at the Adullact Congres 2016 in Montpellier, on 24 June. The city’s school project is a reference case for Adullact’s Agape, a software solution for managing OpenLDAP directory services.

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Unemployment rates continue to run high across Europe; 10 June saw the European Commission publish its much-anticipated Skills Agenda. It is a welcome step towards addressing this challenge, and one that will need to be further built upon, writes Alba Xhixha, Senior Communications and Government Affairs Manager at Aspect Consulting.

Despite a plethora of policy initiatives, unemployment rates have only decreased slightly – at 18.8%, the youth joblessness rate is more than double that of the overall population. The situation is equally challenging for older citizens, who are more likely to suffer from long-term unemployment and are at greater risk of poverty.

Paradoxically, despite the ‘over-education’ in Europe, two million vacancies remain unfilled – particularly in STEM areas such as science, technology, engineering and mathematics. This has huge implications for sectors such as Big Data Analytics for example. Indeed, 40% of European employers say they cannot find people with the skills they need to grow and innovate. PwC’s Annual CEO Survey, published this year, also reveals that 72% of CEOs globally are concerned about the availability of key skills.

To make matters worse, job markets are being transformed by technology and the impact of automation on employment will only increase over time. A recent study by Deloitte showed that around 114,000 jobs in the legal sector alone are likely to become automated, and another 39% of jobs are at “high risk” of being made redundant by machines in the next two decades.

Read more on Euractiv

In this era, companies are exploring digital business models, processes, and automation technologies, as well as seeking to hire and retain people with different skill sets. The IT organization can no longer be considered just a service provider; how it manages the integration of emerging technologies can help determine the success of a company's digital strategy. What are the 5 key IT questions board directors should ask – this is the topic of a recent article by McKinsey and Co

To make their companies successful in the digital world, senior managers need to learn a second language – that is the IT language in their departments. Oftentimes, both board and IT managers seem to speak different languages – while board directors are more concentrated on revenues and sales, IT managers think in a language which is centered on traditional cost-related metrics, such as head counts and bottom lines. According to the authors of the article, board directors are more likely to gain such fluency if they routinely ask these five critical questions relating to the IT organization’s performance:

• To what degree does technology permit core business activities to happen?
• What value is the business getting from its most important IT projects?
• How long does it take the IT organization to develop and deploy new features and functionality?
• How efficient is IT at rolling out technologies and achieving desired outcomes?
• What skills and talent does IT need to achieve desired outcomes?

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Being a digital native does not necessarily mean going online daily. So what exactly makes you be one? Digital natives may not be inevitably tech savvy, but their sense of knowledge of what's going on both digitally and culturally is what sets them up to be natives.

Marc Prensky, best known as the inventor and popularizer of the terms “digital native” and “digital immigrant” in 2001, told Mashable: “Digital immigrants are people who grew up in one digital culture and moved into another. Digital natives are people who grew up in one culture. They don’t have two cultures to compare.”

However, the term has evolved ever since. According to Lee Rainie of Pew Research Center, its meaning is now hotly debated. He explains that many definitions have emerged and they are often fairly contested.

“A native is someone who is totally aware and understands technology,” adds the center’s Director of Internet, Science and Technology. Rainie points out that many scholars and analysts believe even though digital natives are good at using platforms and social media, they don't necessarily always know how to code or how these apps work.

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