Youth Workers 2.0

The 17 of January 2018, the European Commission has launched the Digital Education Action Plan in order to improve key competences and digital skills of European citizens. The Digital Education Action Plan outlines how the EU can help people, educational institutions and education systems better adapt to life and work in an age of rapid digital change. This EU commission initiative is due to the fact that Europe is facing a radical digital transformation of its society and economy. Already 90% of all jobs require at least some level of digital skills. Despite high level of youth unemployment, there are two million job vacancies in Europe many in new digital fields. Training and re-skilling young people to prepare them for the job market are more necessary than ever.

According to the Digital Skills gap in Europe report (19th October 2017), the demand for information and communications technology specialists is growing fast. In the future, 9 out of 10 jobs will require digital skills. At the same time, the report revealed that 44% of Europeans aged 16-74 do not have basic digital skills so a big percentage of European youth lack basic digital skills. So, the current situation can be described as a technology paradox where young people are quick to consume new technology but in many cases they lack the skills and/or interest to master this technology and use it in more critical and creative ways.

Considering the increasing digitalisation of society, it is therefore more important than ever that youth workers develop their own digital and pedagogical skills. At the same time, it is widely acknowledged that youth workers face many challenges as they deal with increasingly complex and diverse learning situations and meet competence demands in a constantly changing work environment with the evolvement of new technologies. As a result, there is an urgent need to provide youth workers a comprehensive professional development programme for upgrading and up-skilling their digital skills.

Thus, “Youth Workers 2.0” project will provide guidance and training for youth workers across Europe on how to use ICT tools and digital methods to better deliver basic skills youth education. This will be done through an integrative approach in collecting, sharing and disseminating innovative and inclusive teaching and learning practices using ICT tools and digital methods. In this regard, the specific objectives of the project for youth workers are:

• To reflect youth workers role in relation to digital approaches;
• To empower youth workers to fully exploit all the potentials of digital education and ICT tools to deliver basic skills education;
• To improve youth workers knowledge of usage of different digital tools making them understand what kind of skills are needed in different contexts;
• To provide youth workers with appropriate training opportunities for further developing their professional knowledge, skills and competences;
• To enhance mutual learning and share of good practices;
• To compose a set of learning materials as open educational resources (OER);
• To create an online platform that will contain all the outcome of the projects and allows youth workers to use quickly and easily all materials produced during the project.

The direct target group of the project will be youth workers involved in youth learning who will upgrade their digital skills and use of technology, whereas the indirect target group is youth with fewer opportunities, who will benefit from digitally skilled youth workers through the provision of high quality youth learning.

Extending and developing youth workers competences, particularly in the effective use of ICT in youth learning, for better outreach and improved learning outcomes is one of the key objectives of the Erasmus+ youth programme for 2018.

The necessity to conduct this project transnationally is due to our intention to increase the capacity of action in the current context of youth workers and to bridge the youth digital skills gap between.