The project was aimed to align higher education with market demands by involving employers in course design, enhancing digital skills, and fostering employability. It addressed curriculum gaps by engaging with Oracle and local SMEs to develop IT courses, improving educators' and students' digital competencies. The focus was on expanding IT training to non-technical students and integrating digital readiness across disciplines. By creating new courses through business-academic partnerships and emphasizing low-code programming, the project’s objective was to accelerate curriculum updates and boost student employability. This collaborative approach would bring benefits to local businesses by providing a skilled workforce, fostering productivity, and driving economic growth. Higher education institutions (academic stuff and students) would get learning materials for courses in 7 languages.
The IT sector in the EU is one of the fastest growing ones, and more importantly, it is one of the key sectors central to building a green, digital and resilient economy. The demand for developers in the EU has registered a continuous annual increase, a trend explicit across all EU member states. Preliminary research carried out by the project consortium indicated that growing up with ICT is not enough to develop the digital skills necessary for the digital economy, and that ICT curricula (even basic level courses) offered to non-ICT majors should be revised in order to better prepare future graduates for the needs of a digital workplace. Low-code software is software that can be fully customized with a minimal amount of programming. Low-code development still requires some basic programming skills, but it is faster, cheaper, and easier to learn. This project was formed to support the digital transformation of HE, strenghten the resilience and capacity of educators and students, to modernize the IT curricula, to offer non-technical majors with opportunities to advance their IT knowledge and employability and fill in the gap between the demand and supply of IT developers.