Digital transformation comes with many opportunities to push our society and economy forward. New technologies are also changing the services that libraries provide. We can benefit from this change if we understand the technological trends that impact our lives and how to use them to our advantage. Digital SkillUp is an EU-funded initiative with a goal to make basic knowledge of emerging technologies available and accessible to all European citizens and SMEs. Digital SkillUp has been created to help you keep up with the digital transformation and to guide you through the complexities of emerging technologies, making learning simple, accessible, and exciting.
The Digital SkillUp partners has conducted an extensive research in the initial phase of the project, with an aim to learn more about emerging technologies, their trends and application in daily lives and work, learners’ training needs and training path development, and existing educational offer in this field. The findings of the analisys have been used as recommendations for the development, design, and further improvements of the Digital SkillUp training courses and the website resources. One of the main takeaways from the research is that digital skills are currently needed more than ever – together with technical and non-cognitive skills, they build up skills sets for future jobs.The research findings suggest that efforts should be made to explain these technologies in a simple and accessible way, providing practical and real-life use case examples, also considering that most of the current online training tend to be too complex and not tailored to citizens and SMEs. Furthermore, experts have highlighted the importance of obtaining certification and having comprehensive information on course quality. These two aspects would allow individuals to access learning that best suits their needs, as well as to follow modular individual learning paths. The main insights and findings are summarised in the report ‘Report on European Educational and Training Landscape and Training Needs for Citizens and SMEs’.
Digital SkillUp is a contribution to the Digital Skills and Jobs Platform and constitutes its learning pillar for emerging technologies. It provides easy-to-follow online courses designed to help citizens, employees, job seekers and organisations find their way to upskill and reskill around emerging technologies and digital transformation.
The Digital SkillUp initiative offers three Digital SkillUp learning modules dedicated both to those who are just about to start their digital education journey and those who want to keep their knowledge up to date:
- Digital Revolution – From computers to apps, from the internet to the cloud, this course explores how digitisation became so pervasive, the risks technologies pose and how to minimise them, and tips on harnessing technology to improve our lives at home and work.
- Emerging Technologies – They are the future – but what are emerging technologies? Where are they applied? How will they evolve, and how will they impact our jobs, businesses, and lives? This course explores these topics, with a deep dive into IoT, Robotics, and AR/VR/MR.
- Cybersecurity – Basic skills make a huge difference to digital safety. In this course, we cover the fundamentals of cybersecurity with real-life examples and exercises aimed at building a simplified cybersecurity action plan for personal or professional use.This is a great opportunity for librarians to learn about the latest technologies. The courses are free and available in 10 European languages, every course is independent, and each course has a certificate of completion available for students passing the course. Join on this learning journey – follow #DigitalSkillUp and stay tuned for more information!
Digital SkillUp has been developed by a consortium of creators of digital learning solutions jointly with education and digital business organisations. European Schoolnet, DIGITALEUROPE, DIGITAL SME Alliance, Public Libraries 2030 and Reaktor have worked together to ensure that Digital SkillUp becomes an innovative EU learning portal fostering knowledge on emerging technologies across the European society.
