On Wednesday 24^th of March, YouthProAktiv took part on the virtual event “Developing Training Methodologies and Content for Specific Job Profiles” organized within the ALL DIGITAL WEEK 2021 campaign. The aim of this event was to share experiences on how to identify emergent job profiles and how to develop online educational programs for those specific profiles.

Borut Cink and Peter Palvolgyi from ALL DIGITAL performed the opening remarks by introducing All Digital activities and objectives and by presenting the new tool developed by All Digital: mydigiskills.eu, a tool to help users understand their digital competences, based on DigComp 2.1. The user completes a self-assessment and later receives a personalized report on their digital competences that they can use to identify their strengths and weaknesses and identify the areas they could develop through training.

Later on, the project DevOps Competences for Smart Cities was presented by three of its developers: Prof. Panos Fitsilis from the University of Thessaly, Prof. Dolores Sanchez Bengoa from the University of Applied Management Studies and Prof. Theodor Panagiotakopoulos from the Hellenic Open University.

DevOps Competences for Smart Cities

The Project

DevOps Competences for Smart Cities is a project developed within the Erasmus+ program and funded by the European Union. It focuses on the public sector and on the skills needed by municipalities work force. The project coordinator is the University of Thessaly with other partners, including the University of Applied Management Studies and the Hellenic Open University.

First of all, the development of smart cities brings some challenges: data, security and technology among others, but most importantly, talent management. The lack of training workforce, shortage of funds for training and aging workforce are the main difficulties to be beaten. According to Prof. Fitsilis the 90% of the organizations declare that workface issues are a challenging area to manage in their agency’s digital transformation. “Only by attracting and retaining high-tech and creative talent can a Smart City exist.” Prof. Fitshilis stated.

In order to win this battle, we need to develop successful strategies, not only by investing in upskilling and in-house academies and training programs but more importantly, developing a new working and life culture and corresponding professions for those.  DevOps is a new approach which brings together two different mentalities: a development or innovator team and an operational team.

How it was done

Firstly, different researches, interviews, documentary analyses and comparisons with existing national and European frameworks were made in four different countries: Cyprus, Germany, Greece and Italy.

Researches on already existing projects showed some gaps, highlighting the lack of introducing the citizen perspective on Smart Cities development and secondly, the lack of academic models for Smart City planning. In order to develop the trainings’ methodology 3 phases were developed: MOOC, Specialization courses and Work based learning.

Prof. Sánchez Bengoa explained that importance was given to the following aspects:

• Balance between transversal and digital competences
• See what is really mandatory to develop the job profiles
• Separate trainings according to the different profiles or jobs developed
• Taking a mix of different skills and adding new ones: tolerance, intercultural skills, leadership, etc.

The Outcome

Finally, the outcomes of the project were presented.

• 42 skills and competences were developed
• Three new professions were developed: Smart City Planner, Smart City It Head and Smart City It Officer/Staff.

The project aimed to identify Europe-wide emerging job professionals for smart cities and DevOps professions. Through this project, new roles for cities employees, new knowledge areas, skills and competences were defined.

In conclusion, the project focused on the public sector and smart cities, developed job profiles for professionals who want to work on smart cities, standardized VET offerings and provided the public with guidelines in order to “win this war of talent”.

Written by Maria Lopez