From digital skills to 'excellence'

The ETF’s first communication campaign of 2022, the European Year of Youth, has focused on 'Digital Skills for Inclusion' to explore how fundamental they are and the progress being made in the EU’s neighbouring regions with ETF support.

Digital skills are a way to ensure that everyone can participate, contribute, and benefit in the digital world. Given the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on young people in particular, nurturing digital skills for inclusion is crucial in helping them move beyond the isolation they experience at a critical point in their lives.

The ETF works closely with key stakeholders in the EU's neighbouring regions to ensure a coherent policy framework for enhancing digital skills for inclusion and to ensure that the digital world leaves no one excluded from learning and working. We undertake policy monitoring to support reform as highlighted this month with the launch of the Osnabrück Declaration monitoring which we are supporting together with key stakeholders in our partner countries.

We are supporting digital inclusion in vocational education and training through the Osnabruck Declaration monitoring together with the EU’s sister agency Cedefop, which is undertaking monitoring in EU member states. Working in partnership is a key component of ETF’s work through which we seek synergies and optimization of resources in supporting countries policy reforms. 

We work with many partners in various sectors, enterprises and schools through learning networks, such as the Centres of Excellence in vocational education and training, and the Community of Innovative Educators, by engaging enterprises in skills development, and through policy advice on fastly emerging topics such as digital inclusion in the new world of work and dealing, for example, with barriers to entry of new labour markets and the precariousness of working conditions of platform workers. 

Join us throughout February, starting from tomorrow, in which we will explore further the concept of ‘Excellence’ and how we are supporting it through our networks engaging the policy community, institutions and learners, and enterprises to enhance learning and development for inclusion and economic growth.

Overview of EU policy framework for digital skills and inclusion

Throughout January we have seen how the ETF is supporting development of digital key competence in education and training in the EU neighbourhood using EU tools such as SELFIE and DigComp – the EU Digital Competence Framework. We have also seen how the EU’s Digital Competence Framework for Educators  is supporting the continuous professional development of teachers and trainers to develop their digital competence and in turn that of learners.

The 2020 EU’s Digital Education Action Plan, focuses on strengthening European societies and economies through high-performing digital education ecosystem and by enhancing digital skills and competences for the digital transformation. The European Skills Agenda focuses on developing the skills of individuals and within businesses through sustainable development in which green and digital skills mutually reinforce each other. At the core of the EU’s Skills Agenda are ‘fairness’ based on the European Pillar of Social rights, and ‘resilience’ based on lessons learnt from the Covid-19 pandemic which the ETF brings to all our work.