Europe’s digital transformation will accelerate with the rapid advance of new technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, cloud computing and blockchain. Like previous major technological advances, digitisation affects how people live, interact, study and work. Some jobs will disappear, others will be replaced, new jobs will be created, many jobs and industries will be transformed and new activities will emerge. (European Commission (2017): A concept paper on digitisation, employability and inclusiveness. The role of Europe) This makes investing in one’s digital skills throughout life of the utmost importance. A renewed higher education strategy and COM(2015) 192: has three priorities: 1: Making better use of digital technology for teaching and learning 2: Developing relevant digital competences and skills for the digital transformation 3: Improving education through better data analysis and foresight Member States introduce coherent provision to improve the digital (and literacy and numeracy) skills of the many millions of low-skilled or low-qualified adults - the group in most urgent need. Moreover, an estimated 90 % of jobs nowadays require some level of digital skills(European Commission (2016): ICT for work: Digital skills in the work place,) and one significant threat is that Europe will lose its most competitive edge — a highly-skilled and educated workforce — should we fail to teach digital competences to Europeans of all ages. Many people with white collar occupations have the opportunity to gain necessary skills during their training at universities. But, adults with blue-collar occupations are very unlucky to gain digital skills. 56% of the adult population have no ICT skills or have only the skills necessary to fulfil the simplest set of tasks in a technology-rich environment (OECD Skills for a Digital World – 2016). During their training, digital tools were not developed therefore they do not possess any digital skills that are required in this age which results in not being able to sustain their jobs in digital age. For example 20 years ago, ICT based lathe machines were not used, they were controlled manually. However, all lathe machines nowadays are ICT based. Adults who do not have basic digital skills are not able to learn and adapt to these devices which results in losing their jobs. So, this project aims to develop digital skills of white collar workers. This project has 8 partners from 5 European dountries, Italy, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, UK. 5 IOs will be produced in this project: -Current Situation Analysis of Adult Training Centers and Adult Trainers in Terms of Digital Skills Traning in Partner Countries -Need Analysis -Preparation of training materials for skills -Piloting the content and uploading to the project website. -Preparation of trainers’ handbook 5TMs will be held, one in every partner country. 6 MEs will be organised to disseminate the project to different stakeholders. It is expected to define digital skills for blue collar workers, create a training content to teach them and have an online tool so that they can keep up with the digitisation and have a sustainable work life in the digital age.
The Level Up project, funded by the European Union Erasmus+ Adult Education Program, was implemented to provide digital skills to adults with blue-collar occupations. The coordinating institution of the project is Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. Partner institutions involved in the project are: The Governorship of Istanbul, TÜRKONFED (Turkey), Bridging to the Future (England), Egina (Italy), MediaCreativa (Spain) and Instituto de Soldadura e Qualidade (Portugal). During the project, a training content consisting of 14 different digital skills training modules that blue-collar adults can benefit from was prepared and transferred to the developed digital training platform. In addition, a teacher's handbook has been developed as a guide and presented to the instructors who train blue-collar adult students. The training content designed for the Level Up project were developed after a 2-stage study. Project Outputs: IO1 (Leading Partner MediaCreativa) - Current Situation Analysis of Adult Training Centers and Adult Trainers in Terms of Digital Skills Training in Partner Countries: In this output the education methods, strategies and samples of adult education centres in Turkey and in the countries of the partner institutions were examined and a European report was prepared. This output revealed strategies used in digital skills training of adult training centres, containing good practices in terms of digital skills training offered by these centers. As the last activity of this output we created a European report projecting a European scope on digital skills training in Europe whic made it transferable at European level. In this output we developed a template for good practices and strategies, a template for approaches and technologies used by adult trainers. Partners interviewed adult training center representatives and adult trainers, results collected from all partners were embedded in the European report. IO2 (Leading Partner TÜRKONFED) - Need Analysis: Aim of this output was to be able to assess which digital skills are needed to develop and which skills are possessed by blue and pink collar workers. After the completion of this output, we had the European wide skill lists which are needed by blue and pink collar workers in order to become up-to-date for the digitalisation of work places. In this output a desk research on finding the required skills of digital era for blue and pink collar workers: Partners found 5 different and most needed skills in the new digital era during the desk research and meeting with focus groups consisting of career experts, trainers from the field and employers were organises in order to find out the digital skills required for digital era and learn current digital skills of blueand pink collar workers. A questionnaire was implemented with the participation of 40 blue and pink collar workers from each partner organisation and they were asked about the skills detected during the first two activities and this way their needs were understood. IO3 (Leading Partner Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality) - the training contents were developed according to the training titles determined considering the results of IO2. As a result of this activity, 14 different training modules were prepared and a digital training platform was established to transfer the produced training contents. The steps of this output included: Distribution of the determined training module titles considering the experiences of partner organisations. Preparation of training materials for 2 skills per partner and validation of the training content in order to improve the content. IO4 (Leading Partner EGINA) - Training contents were uploaded to this platform and the platform was tested by a total of 70 experts (adult trainers) and 35 blue-collar adult students with the work carried out by each partner institution, and feedback was received from the end users about the platform. As a result of the feedback obtained, improvement studies were carried out on the platform. IO5 (Leading Partner Governorship of Istanbul) - the "Teacher's Handbook" was prepared and a document was created to guide adult educators who will use the educational content produced within the scope of the Level Up project. The handbook created describes the in-class activities related to the training content and the working system of the digital education platform and it is ready to download in all partner languages on the project website which is: https://levelup.ibb.istanbul/ All intellectual outputs described on the project application form were realised during the project’s lifetime thanks to the partners' commitment to the project. 5 TPMs were held, one in every partner country with 56 participants in total. One LTTA event was held with 17 participants and 6 Multiplier events were organised to disseminate the project to different stakeholders with the participation of 205 partcipants in all partner organisations.