The 6th March I was invited to give a speach at the DIGITAL COMPETENCES FOR OPEN EDUCATION WORKSHOP, 7TH EDITION 6 MARCH 2020, which was part of the Open Educational Week 2020. The workshop was oeganized by the eLearning Center - Politehnica University of Timisoara, Timisoara, Romania.

My presentation was about Skills for Industry Strategy, and more specificly on the initiatives on Promoting online learning in the workforce in Europe and Skills for Industry, Curriculum 4.0 by PWC, EASME and EC Digital Growth. In Romanian it was entitled Abilități pentru industrie: oportunități de training online pentru forța de muncă din Europa – o inițiativă aEASME/DG GROW, Comisia Europeană . 

Follow the presenation at my Slideshare

Promoting online learning in the workforce in Europe

The report written by PwC EU Services reveals the role of online training in implementing new approaches matching SMEs' needs and realities in a digital world. The challenges SMEs face today related to the digital transformation of the economy, new regulatory and market requirements demanding a sigificant shift in their environmental footprints to achieve the UN sustainability targets by 2030, with significant expected impact on the skills of the workforce, have to be addressed while also considering the budget constraints, limited capacity, fierce competition for talent and extreme time pressure SME deal with.

Contracting authority: EASME/ DG GROW of the European Commission

Contract Nr. EASME/COSME/2017/001

Contractor: PwC EU Services (together with EDEN and Espace Mendes France)

Duration: 2 years (September 2017 – October 2019)

Skills for industry curriculum guidelines 4.0. 
Future-proof education and training for manufacturing in Europe : final report - Studie

We are in the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The main challenges are related to the exponential growth of digital tools that include robots, cobots, connected objects, communication systems, data centers and associated energy consumption. The industrial sector must find new technologies, new designs, new architectures, new communication and data storage concepts, in order to increase the performances of the digital world and, at the same time, to minimise the related energy consumption. Specifically, Europe needs highly skilled, flexible, emotionally and socially intelligent manufacturing professionals that can solve tomorrow’s problems already today. While skill requirements are changing rapidly, enterprises, especially SMEs, struggle to find the talent they need. For industry, it is crucial to support the upskilling of their workforce towards new and higher-skilled roles, as competition for talent will become even fiercer in the coming years. For workers, there is a need to take personal responsibility for their learning trajectory and embrace the concept of lifelong learning. How can education and training providers keep pace with this unprecedented level of change? How does a future-proof curriculum look like? While there are already examples of effective approaches towards adapting engineering training to the needs of Industry 4.0, numerous education and training providers only now begin to consider the necessary development. Reshaping curricula is a considerable challenge, implying complex decision-making processes and various administrative obstacles. Many departments and faculties are still dominated by traditional approaches and subject-related ‘silo thinking’, while the new industrial age requires fundamentally new mind-sets and visionary leadership. The current initiative (January 2018 – December 2019) aimed to address the abovementioned challenges by developing the Curriculum Guidelines 4.0, offering education and training providers a systemised overview of the new ways of organising learning experiences of individuals and groups for Industry 4.0. The guidelines aim to provide key stakeholders with an analytical base for developing curricula for the new industrial age. The objective is to offer a source of inspiration, conceptual guidance and good practice examples. The guidelines aim to be applicable for both designing fundamentally new educational offers and advancing existing curricula, depending on the level of required change