Today although millions of Europeans are currently without a job, companies have difficulties to find skilled digital technology experts. As a result, there could be up to 825,000 unfilled vacancies for ICT (Information and Communications Technology) professionals by 2020. Moreover, there is a need for digital skills for nearly all jobs where digital technology complements existing tasks. In this regard the Digital Agenda for Europe and the priorities of the Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs strive towards facilitation of collaboration among business and education providers, public and private actors to take action attracting young people into ICT education, and to retrain unemployed people. In addition to this, for growth of Europe and creating of new jobs, we need more entrepreneurs, especially in the IT sector, as one of the sectors with the most hight growth potential. Here it is crucial the entrepreneurial education and training to support growth and business creation on one side and reigniting the culture of entrepreneurship on the other side according to the EU Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan. The EU28 unemployment rate was 10.3% in February 2016. In August 2015, the youth unemployment rate was 20.4% in the EU28 and 22.3% in the euro area, compared with 21.9% and 23.6% respectively in August 2014. Summed up, the general problem is lack of IT entrepreneurs and skilled digital and technology experts who will contribute to economic growth of Europe. The causes of the problem are the following:- Low cooperation between educational, nonprofit, public and business sector for designing comprehensive innovative programs for IT and entrepreneurial skills, as well as and lack of capacities for coping with the problem - Lack of acceleration programs for IT and entrepreneurship skills that will produce skilled persons ready to work in IT industry or to open their own business with accent on innovation- Lack of mentorship for young people to develop their carrier in IT or open their own business The main goal of the of the project will be to create IT young entrepreneurs on one side and equip young people with employability IT skills and knowledge (software development) on the other side thus contributing to entrepreneurship development and creating new job places.This will be reached through set of practical solutions: capacity building of partner organizations, design of open innovative accelerated educational program for IT and entrepreneurship skills and mentorship.Specific objectives:O1. To develop open innovative accelerating program (BootCamp) that will equip young people with skills and knowledge in areas: software development and entrepreneurshipO2. To train 300 young people for specific IT and entrepreneurship skills (at least 30 will open business and 100 will become employed in IT industry)O3. To create online mentorship platform for young people who will need support in further development of their business ideas in the IT sector or create carrier in IT industry O4. To establish 40 successful mentorship relations between young people and mentors in IT industryTarget group will be unemployed young people, potential entrepreneurs, young entrepreneurs, organizations working in public, educational, nonprofit and business sector. At the end of this project the young people will gain IT knowledge and skills to start their own business or find job in IT industry; new and existing entrepreneurs will gain practical advices from mentors for taking their business up to new level; the organizations from different sectors will have practical tested acceleration program for IT and entrepreneurship skills for creating new job places and economic growth.
Nowadays, there is a huge gap between companies’ need of skilled digital technology experts and the capacity of the labor market to respond to these needs. It may seem like a paradox if we take a look at the high rates of unemployment especially among young people. In order to identify what is the source of this gap, we have made consultations with stakeholders from the partner countries and we discovered that employers are looking for employees with entrepreneurial skills who can easily adapt to the digital trends which impact the companies. On the other hand, we noticed that in order to attract youth to the IT sector we need to provide them a strong, but yet flexible instruments of learning that respond to their particularities as generation. Besides strengthening the cooperation between educational, nonprofit, public and business sector through designing a learning platform that ensures access to quality courses in the IT and entrepreneurship sector, we also noticed that if we want the learning process to be efficient, we will have to provide to our participants mentorship and support from people with experience in the two mentioned above areas. Thus, the main goal of our project was to equip young people with employability skills and knowledge and increase the number of IT young entrepreneurs who can contribute to entrepreneurship development and create new job places. We managed to do that through designing and creating an open innovative accelerated educational program for IT and entrepreneurship where the subscribers could access three modules on IT topics and one on entrepreneurship, and another platform that gathered together experienced mentors who offered support to the young people in order to better assimilate the information. The specific objectives that we established and also reached are: O1. To develop open innovative accelerating program (BootCamp) that will equip young people with skills and knowledge in areas: software development and entrepreneurship; O2. To train 300 young people for specific IT and entrepreneurship skills; O3. To create online mentorship platform for young people who will need support in further development of their business ideas in the IT sector or create carrier in IT industry; O4. To establish 40 successful mentorship relations between young people and mentors in IT industry. Target group was composed of unemployed young people, potential entrepreneurs and young professionals. We had 620 young people participating in BootCamp which means we managed to double the number of participants established in the objectives. As a sustainability instrument, we will continue to keep both platforms open in order to reach the sustainable indicators which we established at the beginning, meaning to have at least 30 participants who will open business and 100 who will become employed in IT industry, and for those who want to continue their learning and mentorship platform and we will stay in touch with the participants to offer them support in starting their own businesses or find a job in IT industry. Also, through the activities of the project we managed to increase the organizational capacity of all the partners involved to carry out learning and mentorship processes who can help their beneficiaries have a better insertion to the labor market.