ICT Education: Flexible Strategy and Political Will Are Essential

ICT skills and digital agenda are among the top priorities of the new European Commission. Furthermore, the significance of this sector is expected to increase.

ICT skills were also topic of a debate co-organized by CEBRE on 25th November in Prague. According to Jan Michal from European Commission Representation to the CR, the main EU ́s priority is improvement of education in ICT. Alexander Riedl from the European Commission pointed out that rapid digitization requires a profound upskilling of citizens and workforce as many Europeans do not have enough digital skills.

The situation is different from country to country and the CR is close to the European average. “We witness a paradoxical situation: although many Europeans are unemployed, we see many vacancies for digital technology jobs which cannot be filled,” added Mr. Riedl. That’s why the Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs was established by the Commission, supported by 57 organizations so far. Ondřej Neumajer who chaired the working group preparing the Strategy of Digital Education by 2020 at the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the CR informed that the strategy was officially adopted by the Czech government on the 12th of November 2014.

The strategy has three priorities: implement new methods of learning making use of digital technologies to the education process, improve information processing and digital skills of students and develop their computational thinking. Jan Mühlfeit, Chairman of Microsoft Europe, supports initiatives focused on developing digital skills as well. He sees the lack of digital skills as one of the reasons why Europe is losing its competitiveness. In addition, Europe needs leaders that would be capable of implementing strategies of digital education. That is a big issue in the CR, according to President of ICT Union Svatoslav Novák.

Although strategies have been introduced before, they were never properly implemented because of insufficient political will. “Education is a long term process and there is no easy and fast solution in this situation,” said Vice-President of Czech Chamber of Commerce Zdeněk Somr. Therefore, it is necessary to promote lifelong learning and adapt strategies to rapidly changing environment.