National stakeholders and the European Commission have joined forces to create the Digital Skills and Jobs Platform to accelerate digital upskilling in Europe.
The first annual European Girls and Women in ICT day takes place on 22 April 2021, as a part of the commitment EU countries made in the Ministerial Declaration on Women in Digital of 9 April, 2019. In this first edition, several member states have organised online events to showcase the opportunities and challenges for girls and women to study technology, enter and stay in the job market of the digital sector, despite a difficult year marked by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2021, EU Code Week brings six extraordinary hackathons to Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Romania and Slovenia. In these countries, Code Week invites upper secondary school students to form teams and use their coding skills to solve a local challenge.
Hundreds of stakeholders have provided valuable insights to the National Digital Skills and Jobs Coalitions across Belgium, Italy and Austria through the first Community-led Events with more to follow in Czechia, Malta and Lithuania.
Throughout the mandate of the current Digital Skills and Jobs Coalition (DSJC) Governing Board, the Coalition has achieved growth, consolidation and digital skills for millions of Europeans.
Despite increased interest in the cybersecurity field, the gender gap persists. Women are still highly underrepresented among its ranks, while the majority of jobs are being filled primarily by men. The future of cybersecurity is influenced by its ability to attract, retain and promote more cyber professionals including more women. We need an interdisciplinary approach to reach high level of cybersecurity.
The Digital Skills and Jobs Coalition acknowledges pledger organisations who are also participating in the recently launched Pact for Skills.
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.
Europeans will soon have the opportunity to enjoy a brand new learning experience in Artificial Intelligence (AI). 4 networks of universities, SMEs and top researchers will offer new high-quality specialised Master programmes and courses in AI funded by the Connecting Europe Facility Telecom.
Digital technologies are rapidly advancing and changing our lives, from how we work and shop to how we interact with one another. The coronavirus pandemic has further accelerated the need for digital technologies and skills. Everyone today needs to have at least basic digital skills in order to study or work, to communicate, to access a growing number of online public services, and to find trustworthy information.
The study reviews 2019 retail prices of fixed and mobile broadband offers for consumers in the 27 EU States and the UK, Iceland, Norway, Japan, South Korea and the USA. For the first time, data for both fixed and mobile broadband offers was collected during the same monitoring period, from 7 to 20 October 2019.
EU countries outperform their global counterparts in terms of digital skills, from basic to advanced, but they consistently lag behind in the digitisation of public services, a newly published study shows. The International Digital Economy and Society Index (I-DESI) analyses how EU countries rank in terms of connectivity, digital skills, use of internet, integration of digital technology and digital public services in contrast with 18 other non-EU countries.
The Commission has published the 2020 Women in Digital Scoreboard. Women have spearheaded innovation essential to the advancement of digital technology – from computer algorithms to programming. Yet, they are still less likely to have specialist digital skills and work in this field compared to men. Only when looking at the basic digital skills, the gender gap has narrowed, from 10.5% in 2015 to 7.7% in 2019.
Women across Europe are less likely to have specialist digital skills and work in this field compared to men. According to the Commission’s 2020 Women in Digital (WiD) Scoreboard, only 18% of ICT specialists are women and the gender gap is present in all 12 indicators measured.
The work on the European Digital Skills and Jobs Platform has started in September. The objective is to develop and manage a key tool for boosting digital skills in Europe. It will offer information, resources, overview of training and funding opportunities and a community space for networking and collaboration both on European and national level.
EU Code Week took place this year from 10 to 25 October. Teachers, students, NGOs and tech companies in 83 countries participated in the grassroots initiative organising more than 69,000 activities as part of Code Week so far. Despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, this is at the same level as 2019.
This study is designed to monitor the progress of EU Member States towards their specific broadband coverage objectives, namely "Universal Broadband Coverage with speeds at least 30 Mbps by 2020" and "50% of households should have broadband subscriptions of 100 Mbps or more by 2020".
The annual celebration of coding, computational thinking, creativity and innovative mindset is moving online. EU Code Week introduces virtual events to help teachers, parents, librarians and others to organise activities despite the pandemic. They can now register online activities as part of the Code Week. Physical events can still be registered as well, as long as they are allowed.
The 8th edition of the European Code Week, a grass-roots initiative supported by the European Commission, which aims to make everyone familiar with coding and digital technologies in an entertaining and engaging way, opened on Thursday 8 October with an online event. From 10 to 25 October Code Week will feature lots of online activities and an original #CodeWeekDance challenge in which schools, teachers, libraries, businesses and many more, will have the opportunity to participate.
Pledges made to the Digital Skills and Jobs Coalition can now be better grouped and compared through a build-your-own scoreboard tool on the Pledge Viewer which looks at the absolute and relative impact of organisations and their pledges. With this new feature, the actions of those organisations who have worked hard to drive the development of digital skills in Europe will be more easily highlighted than before.
