Digital skills of vulnerable people

The current crisis can become an opportunity to democratize technological change

Project

The project Digital Push promotes digital skills of vulnerable people in order to foster their creative skills and use them as a means for promoting themselves, their craft and ultimately improve their working conditions, bonds and environments.

Goals of the project: 

  • To raise awareness in people with low digital skills for the digital transition and technological updating, especially in the cultural and creative sector;
  • To empower unemployed people with low digital literacy in digital skills, increase their employability potential and promote their work and craft;

To use design thinking methodology to train unemployed people and help trainers in their role of supporting low digitally skilled people.

The final aim of this project is to achieve a greater balance in the labor market thus investing in education in a time of digital and ecological transition.

Digital Push brings a set of innovative factors that touch different dimensions of the project structure, either in its type of education (non-formal education, using a mentoring strategy) or in its methodology (through Design thinking processes such as collaboration, co-production creation and creative problem solving), as well as the tools to be created and used (based on this perspective co-production and creative problem solving).

Target

According to the Eurostat database EU27 unemployment rate was at 7.4% in August 2020, with 5.4 million people moving from employment to inactivity and 4.4 million moving from employment to unemployment.

In terms of the level of digital literacy, in 2019, in the EU, 29% of individuals had overall low digital skills; Regarding the partner countries, the same indicator was as follows: 37% in Turkey, 32% in Italy, 24% in Sweden and 22% in Portugal;.

There is a need to confront this crisis as an opportunity to democratize technological change, which will bring many benefits such as job creation, better working conditions, increased productivity, among others. The challenge is to provide fair access to digital tools and skills to everyone as a bridge for quality employment.

The project targets some of the most vulnerable and low skilled individuals such as unemployed people and workers with a lower educational level, informal market workers (and other precarious employment contracts), low-skilled entrepreneurs and cultural and creative sector workers, as well as, educators, trainers and social support technicians – which frequently contact those populations and more easily and directly help in their digital learning experiences. 

Low-skilled adult jobseekers have previous work experience and formally and informally acquired competences, making them ‘job ready’. Often, they have family responsibilities and this can lead  them to be reluctant to enroll in training courses for longer periods of time, due to the need to work a full time job. 

In all the cases, however, centered approaches may be required to integrate the most hard-to-place low-skilled adult jobseekers or those who need re-skilling due to restructuring. The approaches which support the integration of jobseekers are increasingly tailored towards individual needs as a result of profiling and development of individual action plans. 

In the Digital Push project, we propose the Theory of Change (ToC) as the basis for the Pilot and the activities that we intend to implement with the target groups. Onone hand, we will use appropriate methodologies and practical exercises to involve them; on the other hand, ToC helps to identify the desired long-term goals and then works back from these to identify all the conditions (outcomes) that must be in place for the goals to occur. These are all mapped out in an Outcomes Framework that provides the basis for identifying what type of activity or intervention will lead to the outcomes identified as preconditions for achieving the long-term goal. Through the ToC, the precise link between activities and the achievement of long-term goals are conceived in a visual form and can be better understood. This leads to better planning, because activities are linked to a detailed understanding of how change actually happens. It also leads to better evaluation, as it is possible to measure progress towards the achievement of longer-term goals that goes beyond the identification of program outputs.