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Initiatives
To meet its goal of ensuring 70% of adults have basic digital skills and to support stakeholders in improving the level of digital skills in Europe, the Commission offers a wide range of initiatives including:
- the Digital Skills and Jobs Coalition
- national coalitions for digital skills and jobs
- The European Digital Skills and Jobs Platform
- EU Code Week
- the digital opportunity traineeship
- the Women in Digital initiative
- the European Skills Agenda
- the digital education action plan
There are many other policy areas that also feed in to the Commission’s work on digital skills. For example, the European strategy for data, the European industrial and small and medium-sized enterprise strategies, Digital Innovation Hubs, and the coordinated plan on artificial intelligence.
To read more about digital skills initiatives, have a look at our repository, which contains some of Europe's best digital skills projects. It brings together initiatives from the Digital Skills Awards, pledges made by members of the Coalition, and initiatives selected by Member States
Funding
Significant investments are needed to tackle the digital skills gap. The instruments put in place at EU level for the budget 2021-2027 provide major opportunities for Member States to support the sustainable development of digital skills. They include:
- The Recovery and Resilience Facility: 20% of its funds must be spent on the digital transition of Member States, including on digital skills.
- The Digital Europe Programme: promoting digital skills is a core element of this new funding, which has a budget of around €200 million for 2021 and 2022.
- The European Social Fund Plus: a fund to support EU Member States in reforming national education and training systems to support key skills
- The European Global Adjustment Fund: supports trainings in digital skills to help laid-off workers find another job or set up their own business.
- Horizon Europe: finances grants for master, PhD and post-graduate research activities in all fields including digital through Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions as well as the European Institute of Innovation & Technology.
Latest
The Commission has proposed this week a Path to the Digital Decade, a concrete plan to achieve the digital transformation of our society and economy by 2030. The proposed Path to the Digital Decade will translate the EUʼs digital ambitions for 2030 into a concrete delivery mechanism. It will set up a governance framework based on an annual cooperation mechanism with Member States to reach the 2030 Digital Decade targets at Union level in the areas of digital skills, digital infrastructures, digitalisation of businesses and public services. It also aims to identify and implement large-scale
National stakeholders and the European Commission have joined forces to create the Digital Skills and Jobs Platform to accelerate digital upskilling in Europe.
The Commission recently presented a vision, targets and avenues for a successful digital transformation of Europe by 2030. This is also critical to achieve the transition towards a climate neutral, circular and resilient economy. The EU's ambition is to be digitally sovereign in an open and interconnected world, and to pursue digital policies that empower people and businesses to seize a human centred, sustainable and more prosperous digital future. This includes addressing vulnerabilities and dependencies as well as accelerating investment.
Despite the challenges that schools around Europe and the world faced in 2020, over 3.4 million students and teachers from 84 countries joined the EU Code Week initiative and took part in more than 72,000 coding activities. The next edition of EU Code Week will take place from 9 to 24 October 2021.
Related Content
Big Picture
The European Commission is determined to tackle the digital skills gap and promote projects and strategies to improve the level of digital skills in Europe.
Dig deeper
The Digital Skills and Jobs Coalition tackles the digital skills gap by bringing together Member States, companies and organisations.
All organisations, businesses and government bodies are encouraged to make a concrete commitment to carry out actions to reduce the digital skills gap in Europe.
The Governing Board of the Digital Skills and Jobs Coalition provides leadership and advice to improve the functioning and the impact of the coalition.
National coalitions for digital skills and jobs work to improve digital skills at national, regional and local levels.
See Also
The European Commission is aiming to modernise education and training by funding research and innovation and promoting digital technologies used for learning.