CODE VET

Creating Employment Opportunities with Digital Empowerment

2021-1-DE02-KA220-VET-000028181

Objectives

Training VET professionals in the implementation of courses related to STEM/ICT field, with a focus on coding;

Facilitating the entry into the labour market for young VET learners;

Easing the matching between labour demand and labour request for youth;

Decreasing inequality gap related to low-skilled professions, displacement and misinformation.

Context of the Project: The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has further stressed the need for a shift towards more sophisticated technological and digital solutions in all sectors of economy and society. The COVID-19 context has accelerated the ongoing digitalisation and automation process of many enterprises throughout the globe, thus increasing the pace to which digital technologies are transforming various jobs in the non-tech field due to the requirement in digital technologies mastering. In this sense, “The future of jobs report 2018” (World Economic Forum, 2018) presents a future scenario where a set of digital Technologies might be adopted in different manufacturing industries or in vertical industries, which deploy new automation and robotics features as well as devices running in the information and communication technology industry. The displacement of some existing jobs as a result of automation is inevitable, while digital skills gaps will be related to the need to support digitaltransformation in different industries. In the Industry 4.0 era, the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools and solutions requires new digital skills in the workforce, thus demanding a co-work relationship between humans and machines (Bughin & van Zeebroeck, 2018), which entails more jobs related to computer programming. In this sense, the new jobs requiring advanced digital tools and solutions encompass the specific programming category and the less specific computer programming logic mastering category (ITU, 2020). CODE aims at filling the gap between labour request and labour demand related to digital skills in the nowadays market through a 24-month strategic partnership for innovation in the field ofvocational education and training targeted at learners aged 14-30. In particular the project will introduce VET learners to STEM/ICT skills, focusing mainly on coding, in order to enhance their understanding of programming logic and of its paradigms. The selected age span will constitute an advantage for VET learners and for the project purpose since, as reported by DESI (2020), between 85-91% of young individuals possess at least basic software skills, which makes them more receptive to the selected topic. At the same time, project outputs will serve the purpose of easing the access to new job opportunities for young VET learners, who will benefit from the enhancement of their digital skills and from a trending requirement. Partner countries’ performance as for digital technology integratio in business is lagging, since all of them are below 50% rate, while increasingly big enterprises and SMEs are using softwares for analysis purposes, e-commerce platforms for trade and cloud computing services to improve operations and cut the costs (DESI, 2020).

Activities of the Project

3 TPMs
1 Learning Teaching Training Activities (In Czechia)
3 Project Results
– A Hanbook containing a research and a guide providing an innovative and digital learning system for VET professionals, resulting from the research outcomes and from the Exchange of good practices among Consortium partners;

– A digital platform that will deliver E-training modules elaborated starting from the Handbook;

– A digital game developed in collaboration with VET learners that will introduce and spread the knowledge on ICT coding to a widers public.
4 Multiplier Events (Conferences)

Expected Results

Tangible Results:

Intangible Results:

A Handbook including:
A research report containing data and forecast about the present and future level of automation in manufacture and service sectors. The research will also analyse the educational offer in each partner country, highlighting the weak and the strong points vis-à-vis the challenge of automation in labour market.

A guide based on the exchange of good practices among partners, containing instructions and practical information on how to develop and implement the VET course aimed at developing hard skills for young graduates in the ICT and coding field
Digital Educational format
Digital Educational format based on the handbook that serves as a training base for VET learners. The development of ICT skills will be fostered both through an educational offer that includes innovative, inclusive and digital methodology and through the creation of a group project that involves the content creation of a digital application
Application
A digital Application developed by Innovation Frontiers in collaboration with VET learners for fostering coding culture to a wider audience
Digital self-assessment tool
1 Digital self-assessment tool developed by partners in collaboration with companies that will be used to test the acquired competences and that will be used for issuing the certificates.
Multiplier Events
4 multiplier events (1 for each partner country) in which the outputs will be presented to a wider public, stakeholders and policymakers.

VET professionals will benefit from the exchange of good practices deriving from the collaboration between the partners’ knowledge and experience, thus enhancing their educational instruments through the learning of new methodologies and approaches for the implementation of VET in the STEM/ICT field.
Young people will develop sensitive hard skills that will enable them to enter the labour market more easily, thus facilitating the transition to labour market and adulthood. Young people will have the possibility not only to learn, but also to create outputs that will stimulate their creativity and critical thinking, thus developing self-confidence that will result inselfempowerment.
Young people will benefit from the blended mobility that will enable them to challenge themselves by creating digital content and by interacting with peers and professionals both having a different social and linguistic background, while at the same time stimulating their civic sense of belonging to the European society.