03.03.202, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
On 19 and 20 February in Brussels, a consortium of 21 organisations across Europe launched “SMARCO – SMARt COmmunities Skills Development in Europe” a 4-year Erasmus+ project focused on supporting the skills development for resilient smart communities. This BluePrint Project will directly support the EU Skills Agenda, and align with the Digital Ecosystem Large Scale Partnership’s mission to contribute to the Digital Decade Targets. The involvement of external stakeholders, through the External Advisory Board and the Large-Scale Partnership for the Digital Ecosystem, will be crucial for the project’s success.
The partners and the associated partner (DIGITAL SME France) will work closely with the Project Coordinator, the European Digital SME Alliance, ensuring a trans-national and inter-disciplinary mixture of necessary profiles, skills, knowledge, experience, and expertise required for the successful delivery of the whole project: European DIGITAL SME Alliance (Project Coordinator from Belgium), Asociación de Técnicos de Informática (Spain), BASSCOM (Bulgaria), Cefriel (Italy), Cluj IT Cluster (Romania), Edutus Egyetem (Hungary), Emphasys Centre (Cyprus), ENoLL (Belgium), Fondazione Piemonte Innova (Italy), Forave (Portugal), GAIA (Spain), Hellenic Open University (Greece), Lefkosia Municipality (Cyprus), National College of Ireland, NCSR Demokritos (Greece), Nordic Edge (Norway), Österreichische Computer Gesellschaft (Austria), Politeknika Txorierri (Spain), Stichting Hogeschool Utrecht, (Netherlands) Universidad de Alcalá (Spain) and University of Thessaly (Greece).
Smart Communities Skills Development in Europe
SMARCO strives to become a unique one-stop-shop for smart community skills focusing on three main objectives:
- addressing the skills gaps of smart city engineers and procurers through the development of urgent upskilling courses and forward-looking training programmes;
- granting flexible learning, trans-national dimension and learning mobility, as well as a wide recognition of trainings through the development of micro-credentials, training certificates and wider certification scheme;
- creating a sustainable community of stakeholders related to smart communities’ skills via participation in the Pact for Skills (and its Digital Large-scale Partnership
Throughout the project implementation, the concept of smart communities’ understanding will be linked to increasing economic competitiveness, social well-being, resilience and sustainability, meanwhile ensuring a human-centred approach.
In the initial phase, partners will conduct a needs assessment to identify the demand for smart communities skills as well as the already existing educational resources, projects, initiatives and best practices. An urgent short-term upskilling training will be further piloted with learners in 12 European countries, and additional train-the-trainer materials will be created and promoted towards European Digital Innovation Hubs.
Throughout its journey, the project will provide smart communities’ engineers and public administrations’ staff with HE and VET training programmes which offer the most comprehensive and effective results. At least 400 learners will be engaged in the testing and evaluation phase, aimed at measuring the programme’s success and collecting feedback to improve learning outcomes. In the last phase, the focus will shift to the creation of a certification framework leveraging micro-credentials, as an acknowledgement of the specific acquired skills.
By the end of the SMARCO Project, more than 200 decision-makers will be included in roundtable workshops, 10 VET courses will be developed, and a minimum of 100 learning resources will be collected and developed for HE curricula.
In the last month of implementation, over 100 participants are expected to join the final conference, where the consortium will present a retrospective of the project’s successfully achieved results and its impact on the smart communities experts, regarding the digital, green, resilience and sustainability skills.
Contact person:
Caterina Bortolaso, Project Manager at the European DIGITAL SME Alliance
E-mail: c.bortolaso@digitalsme.eu
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Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
