From CRISS we would like to introduce another European project related to Education and Digital Skills, Compass project.

Digital Skills for entering the job market: Booking a flight, creating an online resume, dealing with controversial on-line contents, sharing documents with your colleagues, protecting your accounts from hackers: these are daily matters for an ever-growing number of European citizens, regardless of age, job or education.
At the same time data show that Informatics and Digital curricula are heterogeneous across Europe, while actual competences are not sufficient for the job market and there is a wide skills mismatch. This scenario will become even sharper in the coming years due to the rise of Artificial Intelligence, Bots, Internet of Things, mobile devices and social platforms.

 
Co-funded by DG CONNECT, European Commission, a consortium of four agencies (Expertise France from France, Dara Creative from Ireland, Lai-Momo from Italy, and Siveco from Romania) decided to tackle the need for digital skills for young unemployed Europeans. In 2017 they launched the project studying the target’s need of upskilling, later designing Compass, a digital upskilling platform. They didn’t have to define skills from scratch: the nine lessons available in Italian, French, English and Romanian, are based on the European Commission’s Dig Comp framework. The platform currently offers nine lessons, either foundation and advanced level, about:

  • Searching information and digital content
  • Collaborating on-line
  • Creating creative contents
  • Interacting through digital technologies
  • Programming
  • Protecting devices
  • Sharing on-line and protecting personal data

 

Using the competences and the scenario defined by the framework has permitted to ensure the standards of digital competency.

We need different skills

As many learners and unemployed people experience everyday, if you has studied Art and want to work as an Art teacher, you could use basic online collaborative tools and text editors. If you has studied Economics and want to work for an insurance company skills about data protection and planning tools are more relevant.

This is why the platform requires learners to choose a career and test the actual skills with a self assessment tool. The matching between the expected career and the test’s results allow learners to build a specific learning path made of a set of suggested lessons. This has been possible thanks to a joint analysis by the Consortium and the OECD‘s Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs: that allowed to link the relevant digital skills for a set of job titles:

  • Vocational education teachers
  • Primary school and early childhood teachers
  • Finance professionals
  • Sales, marketing and public relations professionals
  • General office clerks
  • Secretaries,
  • Authors, journalists and linguists
  • Creative and performing artists

Skills and results have to be shared to impact a career, this is why the platform offers the opportunity to build an ePortfolio of the lessons’ certificates and projects (all the Advanced lessons require learners to create a project consistently with the specific competence). This portfolio could later be shared via social media and the web to sustain learners job search.
From the assessment tool to the final portfolio, Compass has been designed to support a large set of career paths with a wide range of tools. To better deal with the need for digital skills, everybody need to be supported, so test your skills and define your career path, this is the first step to deal with the current scenario: signing up is available via email and social media at www.compassdigitalskills.eu/signin.