Progetti di ricerca

The COVID-19 crisis has heavily impacted education and training and has accelerated digital transformation providing a glimpse into the Future of Work. Moreover, the impact of COVID- has forced the majority of companies and organisations, of all sizes and across… Leggi tutto all industries, to accelerate -or rapidly implement processes for their digital transformation. The world has turned digital overnight and workers need to adapt rapidly to a new reality, which included a need to reduce all face-to-face exchanges and keep physical contact to a minimum, and large-scale adoption of remote ways of communicating. The ACSOL project (Acquiring crisis-proof skills through online learning) addresses two service sectors which have been very hardly hit: 1) Social care and 2) Arts, entertainment and culture. Analysis of labour market intelligence indicates low-skilled workers in these sectors tend to lack skills to easily adopt the digital transformation of their jobs, and that that they often lack the necessary skills to access the more complex online training formats to equip them with these skills. ACSOL offers these low-skilled workers the opportunity to train themselves in essential digital skills in order for them to gain access to further digital training and to be better prepared in their job. The ultimate aim of the ACSOL project is to expand adult digital skills training provision through online learning which would have significant advantages for workers in social care as well as entertainment, arts and culture. In particular, online learning on digital skills could help reach a much bigger number of learners on these sources in the context of the COVID‑19 crisis but it is crucial for our transnational project to make online learning more inclusive and more effectively convey the relevant meaning in the target group, with a training adapted to the profile of the low-skilled workers and key digital skills for challenges and opportunities on jobs related to digital transformation on both sectors. We propose to design and develop an eLearning toolkit that will boost the digital literacy skills and specific skills of current low-skilled workers, through continuing VET, so that they are able to both face the crisis provoked by COVID-19 and to increase their opportunities to improve their job and working conditions. To do so, we will first carry out a thorough labour market statistical analysis of online vacancies in the occupations on social care and arts, entertainment and culture activities to identify the impact of COVID-19 crisis on jobs and the evolution of digital skills demanded by labour market, which will be completed with a survey to micro companies, workers and users about the degree of digital transformation and will help gather ideas for business transformation and digital skills for workers and occupations on these sectors. Then, the identification of opportunities, needs and risks of digital transformation as well as key digital competences and proposals for involving our target groups will be presented and discussed in sectoral triple helix working groups established in each region, and integrated by business, vocational training providers and policy makers. The goal will be to develop a regional proposal at sectoral level with recommendations on topics such as the hybridization of jobs and embracing digital skills with recommendations for the adoption of eLearningstrategies that will be presented to the Annual European Network on Regional Labour Market Monitoring Conference – to achieve a common European vision. Therefore, a transnational perspective for a research and implementation project is proposed. The transnational nature of the project ensures learning from different settings and supports the exchange of good practices, success factors and lessons learned. Finally, we will create new eLearning materials that will embrace the topics that workers with low qualifications and employed in micro companies need to acquire for both confronting the current crisis and more generally to adapt to a changing world of work. The online learning toolkit will include a wide range of solutions such as online courses, educational resources, video content, mobile learning, etc., both formal and non-formal. The ACSOL products will be available online in 5 different European languages and will be tested with workers for their feedback in each region to get conclusions and improvements for the tool which will be incorporated. The ACSOL intellectual outputs and activities will have a series of long-lasting impacts and there will be especially significant impact on the target users of the Toolkit. The low-skilled European workforce of the social care sector and the culture sector, will be benefitting from our toolkit because it will help them acquire the digital skills they need both to access online, distance or blended training, and to maintain or transform their jobs in these sectors.