Changing skills demand for digital economies and societies
The digitalisation of the economy and society promises to bring dividends, spur innovation, generate efficiencies and improve quality of services in a wide range of sustainable development areas, from agriculture to health, infrastructure, environment and education. The digital transformations contribute not only to innovation in products, but also to innovation in processes, work and organisational arrangements. At the same time, digitalisation is disruptive. It raises a number of important poficy challenges including privacy, security, consumer protection policy, competition, taxation, jobs creation and destruction and skills development, to name but a few. It also runs the risk of worsening of inequalities within and across countries. The digital gap is a new development gap where countries not able to swiftly adjust to the digital economy run the risk to fall behind. But digital divide does not only refer to access to the Internet. It also concerns capacity, knowledge and skills needed to access and analyse the information, and to best utilize it in a given context. Skills and capabilities define to what extent individuals, societies and businesses can reap the digital dividends and prevent the digital divide to grow.
The project, which is part of a broader collaboration between UNESCO and ILO, contributes to the successful skills development policy outcomes in the context of Sustainable Development Goal 4: "Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all, in particular to substantially increase the number of youth and adults with relevant skills for employment, decent jobs and entrepreneurship".
Within this project, I prepared a report which aims at identifying how skills demand is shaping, and how education and training should respond to the rapid pace of technological and structural change induced by digitalisation across sectors of economic activity. The report will define approaches for education and training systems to realise their potential to meet the demands from digital economies and societies. It will contribute to a new narrative of reforming education and training in a lifelong learning perspective that recognises the trade-offs between various factors, including the objective of improving quality, reducing inequalities and offering lifelong learning opportunities for all and the need to more widely share the benefits of digitalisation.
The Report was published on December 2021 and can be found here: