Digital skills for all - European Digital Learning Network

The digitalisation of our world has caused significant changes for job opportunities, profiles, and to complete tasks. European citizens have seen a transformation in the level of digital skills required for their jobs, to create digital content or work with digital platforms. Job opportunities have been created, and others have been changed to evolve with the digital revolution.

In 2016, 71% of European employees have been required to have basic or moderate digital skills to complete their tasks at work. To reduce this percentage, companies have trained (through formations) their employees to increase their digital and ICT competencies, education in universities adapted the programs to teach how to use digital tools and more. Regarding the European Commission, in 2017, 44% of European citizens between 16 and 74 years old didn’t have basic digital skills. While in 2018, the Commission reported that “43% of Europeans do not have basic digital skills”. The gap between the digital skills required and the ones the Europeans have is important. Moreover, the digitalisation of things makes them grow and change faster than before. The Europeans need help to acquire digital skills to have a suitable profile that will help them obtain a job and be able to fit in the fast-growing digital society.

The Digital Single Market is a strategy the European Commission implemented in 2015 which intends to unlock the barriers Europeans can meet with the digital transformation to benefit of all its goods. One of the goals of the Digital Single Market is to provide digital opportunities to European citizens to enhance their digital skills.

The European project Connected Learning is sharing the goals of the Digital Single Market. It aims at creating, a sustainable digital portal and application for youth European organisations, cities, regions, and councils to provide, map and validate learning opportunities and promote digital skills for young European people. This project is a boost to support European citizens to improve their knowledge and gain experience in the digital world of work. Visit http://connected-youth.eu to know more about this project!

Learning has no limits. The European Digital Learning Network is developing many projects to help European citizens increasing their digital skills, you can find them on www.dlearn.eu.