The booklet presents curated real-world good practice examples that help translate our Software Skills Strategy into concrete actions. In turn, it will inform the design of education and training programmes that will contribute to skill, upskill, and reskill individuals into high demand professional software roles.

Foreword

Designing a strategy is both an exciting and challenging exercise. If it lacks practical relevance, it will bring no added value. Only if you bring practical and appropriate examples, your strategy can take a meaningful form.

ESSA’s Software Skills Strategy for Europe is based on extensive research, where we looked at the market demand and supply in software skills. We asked ourselves a few questions like what are the wishes and expectations from the labour market? What does supply consist of? But above all: how can the supply better meet the market’s expectations?

We also explored what is happening from the side of education and training — a field that develops pretty quickly with the aid of ICTs, bringing new learning modes and opportunities. Today, learning and working at a distance are part of our daily practice. But, not only technologies have the power to expand opportunities. They can also be brought forward by initiatives, visions of people and organisations. Our strategy has been inspired and fueled by some of them.

The booklet presents curated real-world good practice examples that help translate our strategy into concrete actions, and in turn, into the design of education and training programmes that will contribute to skill, upskill, or reskill individuals into high demand professional software roles.

The European Software Skills Alliance (ESSA) is a partnership between twenty-six organisations from universities to large ICT companies, to EU-wide business associations. The partners have provided one or more cases, based on their own experience, to illustrate our strategy. We hope that these case studies can serve as further inspiration, not only for employers, educational institutions, and trainers but also for administrations, governments, and policymakers.

Thanks to all contributors.

This booklet contains

• Learning game development at a distance with open-source tools (Hellenic Open University)
• An open education model for underserved students to be career-ready (IBM)
• Digital certificates for the recognition of non-formal education (HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht)
• Cultivating employees’ skills and attracting young ICT talents (Zemanta, an Outbrain Company)
• Training young NEETs for the most in-demand ICT job profiles (Adecco Formazione)
• A gamified, real-world approach to learning programming (Junior Olympiad in Informatics, High School XIV Warsaw)
• Revamping traditional ICT education with an agile SCRUM-based methodology (HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht)
• Glocalising high-quality, scalable training activities in tech (NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute)
• Efficient corporate training with serious games (Pegneon)
• Training companies’ staff in software skills (University of Ljubljana)
• Profession-relevant soft skills training for ICT professionals (ITS Antonio Cuccovillo)
• Bringing knowledge of market players into education (ICT Association of Hungary)
• Achieving high quality, hands-on professional training for IT students (ICT Association of Hungary)