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About Skills & Jobs

What reading, writing and arithmetic were to yesterday's labour market, digital literacy is to today's.

ICT practitioners are an essential pillar of the modern workforce and the European economy as a whole. However, many vacancies for ICT practitioners cannot be filled, despite the high level of unemployment in Europe. While demand for employees with ICT skills is growing by around 3% a year, the number of graduates from computing sciences fell by 10% between 2006 and 2010.

If this trend continues, there could be up to 900 000 unfilled ICT practitioners' vacancies in the EU by 2015.

Some of the initiatives launched to create growth and jobs in Europe are the folowwing:

  • The Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs was identified as a key priority in the Digital Agenda Review adopted in December 2012. This wide multi-stakeholder partnership includes established ICT and non-ICT industry, such as web businesses, and other stakeholders in the fields of education and training providers, employment services and regional government.
  • In January 2013, the Commission adopted the Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan to unleash Europe's entrepreneurial potential. This Action plan included a set of actions, such as a Start-up Europe Partnership, to unlock expertise, mentoring, technology and services; work with European investors in order to increase the flow of venture capital and crowd-funding (in particular for web start-ups); and stimulate the emergence of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOcs) and the setting up of platforms for mentoring, and skill building.
  • The Web Entrepreneurs Leaders Club brings together world-class web entrepreneurs to strengthen the web entrepreneurial culture in Europe as well as a European network of web business accelerators.

 More details can be found on the following websites:

 

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