“Women4IT” partners enter the second year of the project with ambition to create innovative solutions promoting the employment of young women into digital jobs.
September marks the end of the first year of the “YOUNG-ICT WOMEN: Innovative Solutionsto increase the numbers of EU vulnerable girls and young women the into digital agenda”project (no. 2017-1-094), in short, Women4IT. The project is funded by the Youth Employment Programme of the EEA and Norway Grants and implemented under the leadership of the Latvian Information and Communication Technology Association (LIKTA), with partners from Belgium, Greece, Ireland, Lithuania, Malta, Norway, Romania and Spain years 2018-2021.
The Women4IT project aims to increase the employability of young women (15 -29 years) in digital technologies and boost the opportunities female talent brings to economic growth. The project will assess the digital skills of 1000 women in 7 countries and, depending on the need and support of employers, provide digital skills training and personalized career guidance to minimum 700 of them. Additionally, it will reach 10.000 youth by digital career awareness activities.
During the first year, partners have launched the national participatory platforms in their countries and released two research studies. The first one explores good practices and initiatives regarding improving the employment in ICT sector jobs of women and NEETs in the partner countries (Greece, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Romania and Spain). It offers innovative solutions to promote the employment of young women in digital jobs, taking into account the current needs of the labour market from the perspective of employers, stakeholders and young women. You can see more details of the study here.
The second study presents the results of the desk and field needs assessment research to highlight key elements and issues regarding young women’s access to technology, labour markets, digital training as well as labour market demands. The study identifies future digital skills trends in employability to prepare trainees for the work challenges ahead of them and provides input for designing new innovative profiling solutions.
Finally, partners have identified eight digital job profiles found to be the most suitable for the target group and appropriate for the needs of the future labour market. These include: Customer Support Specialist, Data Analyst, Data Protection Specialist, Digital Media Specialist, Graphic designer, Personal / Project Assistant, Software Tester and Web developer. You can see more details of the study here.
During the first year, the project has gained considerable visibility e.g. through presentation at the ICT 2018 EU Commission Conference in Vienna in December 2018, the e- skills4diversity, European high-level digital skills conference in February and the Start-Up Europe Summit during the Romanian EU Presidency Conference in Cluj in March this year as well as through broad social media outreach.
In October, project partners will meet in Dublin to kick off the second year of the project by presenting a test version of the online profiling platform. Once finetuned, the tool will be translated into 7 languages and used to assess digital competences for the specific digital job profiles to prepare for the launch of the new online platform in all countries.
For more information on the project, see: https://women4it.eu/
