The two most significant challenges we face in Europe over the next decade are the transition towards a climate-neutral society and the retention of our industrial competitiveness. Equally within regional governments across Europe, it is acknowledged that ‘digital transformation is a necessary process of technological development in order to create conditions for innovation and business growth, increase the efficiency of the workforce, a competitive digital economy, and a high citizens standard.’

We know that the achievement of these goals will be contingent on the successful Digitalisation of key manufacturing and services sectors and that the broad adoption of existing digital technologies in these areas is essential to safeguard a sustainable and prosperous future. Yet that future is not guaranteed. Industry and many EU Member States are lagging in the development of the digital skills necessary to implement those technologies and drive this transition. Digital up-skilling requirements across the labour force are now critical. We must accelerate our efforts. We must invest now in our most valuable resource, our people.

Within Member State's Recovery and Resilience Plans, it proposes to ‘design a training infrastructure that responds to the different professional profiles, present and future, containing all those elements that allow entrepreneurship, updating knowledge and skills and, ultimately, the possibility of making the process of continuous learning a reality throughout life on an individual and collective level’. This approach and philosophy are at the heart of how InnoGlobal has successfully led industry-focussed up-skilling and re-skilling in partnership with the Irish Government for the past twelve years. 

InnoGlobal has a strong track record in bringing consortia together through a public-private partnership to deliver on skills and research projects. InnoGlobal has brought together governments, HEIs, Research Institutions and EU officials through multiple meetings and webinars for the purposes of developing a fit-for-purpose approach to address the significant high-tech skills challenges that exist in Europe and indeed globally. This extensive process of stakeholder engagement has reinforced the need for urgent initiatives to address critical skills deficits - all of which are highly appropriate in a European context.

The priority of Member State's Recovery and Resilience Plans is to ‘enhance the qualification levels of the population and to achieve an adequate balance between the levels of training of citizens and the qualification needs of the human capital of the labour market, in such a way that over 50% of the active population have an average qualification and between 35 and 40% of the population with a high level. This will increase the number of people with professional accreditation of their skills, to the goal of 100% of the workforce and which currently only reaches 51%’