Go Co-Creative with us on Future Job Market!

We are happy to introduce you to the first edition of SkillsMatch Newsletter. Here we will inform you about the latest updates in our work to improve youth employability and provide a practical soft skills framework.

In this first edition, we will tell you more about our project SkillsMatch and the latest actions performed by our team. You will also get the news about recent events, for instance our first ever co-creation workshop which was devoted to understand stakeholders needs and national differences as a starting point to help define the project further developments.

The SkillsMatch Dissemination team

Project in short

SkillsMatch is a two-year project running from June 2018 to June 2020. The aim of the project is to develop and demonstrate an online platform which will help users adapting to the demands of the labour market, with particular focus on the support of Non-Cognitive (NC) skills. The consortium is just working in this first phase of the project to establish a comprehensive NC skills framework.

More information

Personalized Learning Roadmaps

SkillsMatch platform will offer users a self-assessment NC tool showing strong and weak points in relation to what is recommended for specific occupations, a personalized training itinerary including Open Education Resources (OER) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as well as a portfolio linked to open badges which will provide recognition of the new skills.

Seven partners joined forces in this project: eGovlab, Stockholm University (Sweden), Eurecat (Spain), DMC Metrix (Ireland), Universidad de Alcalá (Spain), Everis (Spain), Fondazione Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and Trinity College Dublin (Ireland).

The project is co-funded by the European Commission.

INITIAL STEPS

As part of the Non-Cognitive Skills Framework definition, SkillMatch’s team is compiling information from more than 20 reports to guarantee high representativeness of framework while the connection to transversal NC Skills of ESCO is being explored.

Further, a first analysis of the demand of NC Skills, basic statistics from MOOC and OER repositories and first tests of the webscraping automatic procedures are already providing results to configure the link of NC skills to occupations and employment.

As part of the European Vocational Week, SkillMatch has hosted a co-creation workshop where training providers, career guidance counselors, employers and professional organisations have been invited to co-create the future of employability and soft skills frameworks.

Memories from Skills Match co-creation workshop Dec 2018

Spreading the word: recent events to make SkillMatch go public

SkillMatch has attended the following events:

Learnovation Summit, Dublin, Ireland - October 3rd 2018
eCF Council Final Conference, Brussels, Belgium - October 11th 2018
CRUE Gerencia, San Cristobal de la Laguna, Canary Islands, Spain - October 25th 2018 -
European Skills Conference on Digital Transformation and IT Professionalism, Brussels, Belgium - November 15th 2018
Workshop : "Developing and validating the competences - Training actions on the informed and aware use of digital technologies for the education on the Global Citizenship" - December 17th-19th 2018

Upcoming events

ITWorldEdu (Barcelona, May 16-17)

The 11th edition of this summit will be presenting the current approaches to improve education through the use of technology and innovative methodologies. This summit will introduce keynote speakers such as Sugata Mitra, Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University and Stephen Heppell, CEO of Heppell.net and professor in Bournemouth University.

Related Projects

ICT4YOUTHWORK has published two reports that aim at helping youth workers with their digital skills around online youth work. The first report (O1) presents 30 best practices in European countries on how youth workers can use social media and online tools to better reach or communicate with the youth.

DEVELOP project recently published a paper on Community-Based Measures for Social Capital, which will be presented at the Complex Networks conference in the UK on 11–13th December. The DEVELOP project seeks to create an online system to allow employees in large companies assess their levels of transversal skills, and recommend training opportunities to help improve those skills and enhance career prospects.

WAMDIA project is an Erasmus+ KA2 VET project focused on the digital accessibility (DA) skills for ICT users (mainly from VET and education, SMEs and public entities and government) as an action aligned to the EU Directive 2016/2102 which has entered into force on 23rd September 2018. Directive is applicable to all activities funded with public money (e.g EU projects). WAMDIA has published the report on a big survey with 525 respondents and 27 interviews on the knowledge of DA and its regulation, the perception of ICT users, etc.

LEVER UP project discussed with VET institutions and schools the existing frameworks on soft skills and transversal competences and their potential application during a multiplier event, held on 11th July in Milan. SkillsMatch was presented as an upcoming model, aiming at merging or referencing the most important existing models.