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On the path towards advanced digital skills


Delivering advanced digital skills for Europe’s Digital Decade is the title of last online gathering hosted by the Digital Skills and Jobs Coalition, to which I was invited on 26 October 2021.

Together with several other panelists from various UE country members, I shared Spanish approaches to meet the future demand of digital experts and how we are walking on the path towards advanced digital skills.







In line with the European digital strategy and Spain’s Digital Agenda 2025, the Spanish Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan sets the roadmap to accelerate a humanistic digital transition in Spain, through investments and reforms that boost the infrastructures, skills and technologies needed for a digital economy and society. Given its cross-cutting nature, the digital transformation will be deployed across the Plan as a whole: from the urban agenda to education, from agriculture to tourism, from industry to mobility, from the modernisation of public administration to the new care economy.

The advanced digital skills are framed within this digital strategy in terms of Digital professionals, so as for the promotion of Information Technology and Communications specialists. The measure includes the adaptation of the existing vocational training offer and the design of new specialties that allow the acquisition of advanced digital skills and progress in key areas such as cybersecurity, as well as the creation of Open Educational Resources for teaching with digital media.
Besides, it requires the provision of advanced digital skills for the workforce, by improving the skills they already have and requalification (up-skilling and re-skilling respectively) through training processes that are conceived as lifelong learning ones, all along their entire professional life, and that respond to the double challenge of the digital and green transition.

(Let’s take into account that 34% of the active population in Spain has insufficient digital skills and around 40% of people without basic digital skills are unemployed.)

It is a priority to increase the number of highly qualified ICT people (ICT specialists) to guarantee the necessary skills that allow a progressive but steady transition to an increasingly digitized economic environment and subject to new environmental demands.

So, our goals in this matter, up to 2024, are two main ones:

First, to guarantee the acquisition of advanced digital skills both for the unemployed (we aim at improving their employability conditions) and for the employed, in the private and the public sectors, so that they learn to continuously adapt to the new demands of their working life, with an emphasis in those most affected groups by digitization and robotization of tasks. Thus, the goal seeks to increase both the number of people with digital skills beyond basic level and the number of people with basic knowledge of software.

Secondly, to guarantee that Spain has ICT specialists. Currently, Spain hardly  has 1,900,000 ICT specialists, representing 3.2% of the total employment, that is below the 3.9% average for the EU-28. 
Therefore, it is sought to increase their number.

In order to accomplish these goals, Spain has launched the National Plan for Digital Capacities. One of the pillars of this plan is the Digital Skills for Employment which comprises various training initiatives: on one hand, training on digital skills for the unemployed and the employed in the private sector, and on the other hand, ICT vocational training degrees.




Follow the conversation at #DSJCCommunity by @DigitalSkillsEU
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