In the current ICT landscape, a competitive CV is key for students to land a job. But how can the transition between education and the job market be improved? How can we make sure students finish their schools with relevant skills and competences, recognised by the job market? SkillDisplay aims at becoming the main online platform to obtain and legitimize ICT skills which are likewise recognized by employers, educators and industry representatives. The platform will consist of an online space, where all stakeholders mentioned above can discover tools and features which help them reach their certification goals. - For students, SkillDisplay provides support in developing and acquiring new key competences. The platform hosts a variety of much sought-after ICT skills, which can be grouped into learning modules that have been developed with leading industry representatives. Learners can furthermore create a personal profile in order to list all the skills they acquired and learning modules they either completed or are in the process of completing. The acquisition of each skill can then be verified by either an educator, an employer, an existing industry certification or by using self-certification . The personal profile can then be downloaded and shared, i.e. as part of a CV. - For employers and educators, SkillDisplay simplifies the creation of learning material to be used by students or employees. Skills and learning modules can be grouped and customized so as to enable employers and educators to create their own learning material which is up-to date and compliant with industry standards. Each learning module is created in collaboration with industry representatives: skills and modules are being updated regularly to represent changes and updates in learning materials or an official curriculum. Educators are also able to get in touch with industry experts and leaders in the field of education, in order to suggest improvement of the learning tools, track progress of their learners, identify usage frequency of technologies, estimate the speed of the learning progress and much more. An early version of the platform has been already tested and used in public school courses, with a number of positive outcomes: - teachers had access to ready-to-use, up-to-date and industry relevant material for their courses; - teachers and students had the opportunity to meet industry representatives of specific courses, to gain more insight and establish further cooperation; - students could then decide to obtain the official industry certificate for that specific skillset, as the material and content had already been covered during class; - industry representatives could evaluate how effective their learning material was and potentially improve it to achieve a better learning experience.
The SkillDisplay project was conceived from the notion that teaching much too often finds itself founded on outdated learning materials, with limited or unclear connections to real world challenges, and undercut by simplified and hardly comparable feedback mechanisms like simple numeric marks. Too often the questions "What do I need that for?", "What is it based on?", "Which competences do I have?" and "Where can I go from here?" are only answered to an unsatisfying degree. The Premise and Methodology Knowledge is broken down into more easy to grasp nuggets, called Skills. A Skill represents a particular competence that is grasped within a few minutes, so a learner can asses how hard it will be and how long it will take to learn that Skill. Skills may have prerequisites, other Skills that should be learned before, which creates a tree of connected Skills delving deeper and deeper into a field of competence. For example, before I can learn the Skill how to run I should already know how to walk. And maybe later I can learn how to run and jump hurdles. In this way SkillDisplay provides a structured way to visualize knowledge, creates suggestions and goals for the learning process, and defines clear competences that are picked up. Each Skill provides a description, learning goals, and suggestions for teaching materials. Skills can be verified by different parties, creating a competence-based feedback and verification system that provides learners with exact information on what they have learned, under which circumstances, and how that is verified. This allows for tracking of learning progress, educational verification, detailed skill management in business environments and efficient certification preparation. All on a comparable level based on standardized skills. The SkillDisplay Erasmus+ Project SkillDisplay aimed at becoming the main online platform to obtain and legitimize ICT skills which are likewise recognized by employers, educators and industry representatives. To achieve this, the platform created during this project consists of an online space, where all stakeholders mentioned above can discover tools and features which help them reach their certification goals. Industry experts defined skills for their field of expertise, depicting real world industry certificates. Schools teaching those competences implemented the platform in their classes, benefiting from ready to use skill definitions and structures. The partnership was assembled to reflect the needs, and therefor input, of those four stakeholder types: Verein Business Angels (BA), located in Vienna, Austria, is a non-profit organization founded by teachers and developers to promote teaching efforts in the ICT sector. BA provided the underlying concept for SkillDisplay, derived from practical and educational experience, and served as coordinator of the Erasmus+ project. BA was also involved in UI design and worked closely with the technical developer in that department. HTL Wien 3 Rennweg in Vienna, Austria, and Liceul Tehnologic Grigore Moisil in Braila, Romania, both schools for higher technical education, entered the partnership with the goal to integrate SkillDisplay in into their curricular work to support teaching staff with lesson preparation and provide integrated competence based teaching. Involving teachers and students provided most important insight into the respective needs of those two stakeholders. Reelworx GmbH from Linz, Austria, served as technical developer of the SkillDisplay platform and is an experienced contributor to the TYPO3 CMS. TYPO3 GmbH from Dusseldorf, Germany, provided the initial content for the platform, developing Skills for their three leading industry certificates for Editors, Integrators and Developers of the TYPO3 CMS. TYPO3 provided the experts that defined (and refined) the necessary skills for each certificate, and was heavily involved in the project dissemination to its already existing and well developed community. Synthesis Center for Research and Education from Nicosia, Cyprus, provided background research on current needs in the for stakeholder types, and conducted cyclic feedback rounds among the user base as basis for the 3-year development. As a result SkillDisplay hosts a variety of much sought-after ICT skills, which can be grouped into learning modules that have been developed with leading industry representatives, freely accessible for learners. For employers and educators, SkillDisplay simplifies the creation of learning material to be used by students or employees. The platform now serves as the primary tool for certification generation for TYPO3 and will be rolled out to 300 companies all over Europe in a partnership program. SkillDisplay has also supported a development project in Africa and Latin America, to promote ICT skills for education and administration efforts.