The aim of the project was to develop practical solutions for local authorities in the way they approach digital skills, taking into account the specific challenges they face, and how they can support their staff in developing their skills. From the staff's point of view, the project involved structuring training pathways for local authority staff using content that is better adapted to the diversity of their profiles, needs and constraints, which may relate to the status of the staff, the nature of their tasks, their age, their appetite for digital technology, their level of digital practice, their working patterns or situations, or the digital equipment they have at their disposal. By adapting this approach to two different territorial contexts, the aim was to document and build on the experience for the purpose of spreading the approach to other French and Belgian local authorities.
We applied to this project in response to the growing need for local government employees to develop digital skills, in a context of fast paced digitization of local administrations and citizens' uses. Studies carried out in France (Les Interconnectés) and Wallonia (Smart City Institute) have shown that many local authority employees do not have all the skills required to deal with all the professional situations they encounter on a daily basis. Although this challenge is a widely-shared concern among local authorities, current training programs do not adequately address the specificities of local authority professions, nor the evolution of learning methods. In addition, not all local authorities have the same financial and human resources to support this digitalization. The aim of the project was to experiment with the acquisition of digital skills using a more personalized approach tailored to the missions and working environment of local governments employees, in two distinct territorial contexts: the municipalities of the province of Namur and the departments of the Bastia urban community.