ENHANCING THE DEMAND-DRIVEN YOUTH EMPLOYMENT IN IT SECTORS

Background We applied to this project to mainly address how to better prepare young IT skilled youth for better employment in IT sectors/market and help IT businesses to recruit young IT talents in better/more effective ways. With that in mind, we addressed the needs of: -addressing the importance of IT skilled youth to help EU countries’ transformation into digital World and digital economy where there are millions of IT staff needed. -addressing EU Digital Action Plan for smarter and sustainable digital economy, -helping IT businesses to better collaborate with young IT talents in terms of employability and addressing the crucial employability issues/needs of qualification recognition, assessment/evaluation of skills, working conditions, development of communication, teamwork etc. -supporting the creation of work-based industrial placements of youth in IT sectors, -addressing the need for online skill validation tools and platforms to enable youth and IT businesses to better assess/evaluate/validate IT skills and act further on preparing themselves for the IT employment opportunities. Objectives We wanted to achieve: -creation of awareness on the importance of training/preparing young people as IT experts to fill out excessive human capital need of today’s digital World and economy, -helping young people about how they can be better employed in IT sectors by investigating collaboration methodologies among young IT skilled people and IT businesses, -helping IT businesses to learn how they can create better employment/recruitment processes, methods and strategies to attract more IT skilled youth, to help them learning IT businesses’ recruitment needs, criteria and requirements, -helping young IT skilled youth to learn/observe real IT business working conditions and work enviroments via LTTs, study visits to IT companies in different countries, -enabling young IT skilled/interested youth to evaluate/assess their IT job specific skills to understand their readiness/skills for various IT jobs via taking online skill assesment tool that we developed (IO3). Implementation We implemented: -Research to investigate and create various outputs, -3 TPMs to plan, monitor and evaluate project activities, teach how to conduct project objectives in proper formats to all the partners, -5 LTTs in 5 different partnering countries to provide trainings, teachings, study visits, work-based learning interventions, discussions, private learning sessions with IT experts and so on. -Various dissemination interventions including workshops, conferences, visits to IT companies, attending national IT meetings, career fairs, visiting Technoparks, reaching out to IT experts, stakeholders and policy makers. -creation and publishing of various written materials as project results. -creation and launching of online skill validation tool (as a part of IO3) Achievements -Production of result 1, ‘’Development of Cooperation Methodologies Between Youth and IT Businesses’’ as a 78 pages written research output which includes various cooperation methods and strategies, -Result 2, “Non-Formal and Work-Based Employment Trial Program” as a 38 pages of output which outlines the essentials of creating an internship program for IT companies to employ young IT talents in their workforces and assist creation of short or long term internships in any type of IT company, as a comprehensive guide with all the necessary components -Result 3, ‘’Online Skill Validation Platform’’ which has 2 parts, in the first part, we produced 197 page written document which outlines around 20 IT job areas with their essential job features, job specific interview and recruitment questions that IT businesses ask for recruitment. In the second part, we produced online tool which is an online questionnaire tool to allow people to take questionnaires to assess/evaluate their IT skills based on specific IT areas.