BRIDGING E-SKILLS AND DIGITAL JOBS
The 5th annual European Get Online Week (GOW) organized by Telecentre
Europe took place in 25 countries on 24-30 March 2014. Its motto “Get
empowered. Get employed” recalled the campaign’s initial mission to
encourage people to gain basic knowledge about the Internet, while bringing
attention to raise awareness amongst the young and unemployed on the e-skills
needed for the 21st century workplace.
Young IT practitioner preparing for a GOW webinar on “safe finances” in Lithuania
Europe will be facing 500,000 ICT vacancies by 2015, up from the current 300,000. In contrast,
Europe has to address high unemployment of 26 million people, 25% of which are young (15-24).
Even further, 90% of all future jobs will be digital, meaning that jobseekers will need a set of digital
skills to be able to access these jobs. Telecentre Europe has aligned GOW with some major initiatives
at the European level and has partnered with the ICT industry x (leaders? Companies?) to tackle the
above miss-matches and opportunities.
For the first time, GOW was part of the year-long eSkills for Jobs campaign organised by the
European Commission, European SchoolNet and Digital Europe. GOW’s alignment to eSkills for Jobs
and to the Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs has been extremely positive, boosting the reach and
impact of GOW partners and actions.
The support from Microsoft and Liberty Global maximized the impact of GOW national partners and
connected telecentres to some top-class opportunities like the Microsoft YouthSpark and to
promising new-entries like YouRock. It also enabled young and unemployed to get their eSkills
certified and to learn what ICT jobs are out there, what types of skills are needed.
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Roughly 104,000 Europeans were involved in GOW 2014, almost 54,000 taking trainings while
another 50,000+ attended over 5,000 events at national or local level, like seminars and workshops.
More than 7 million people were reached in total during this year’s campaign through media and
social media.