The European Commission has agreed that 2023 will be the European Year of Skills. It aims to strengthen digital skills and achieve the targets set in the Digital Decade of reaching 20 million ICT professionals and 80 % of European citizens acquiring digital skills. In this way, we will be able to become a more prepared, innovative and sustainable Europe by 2030.
The Spanish Government joins this objective and is deploying various strategies to strengthen the digital skills of the workforce and the general public, reducing digital gaps; completing the digital transformation of education; ensure training in digital skills throughout working life; and to increase the percentage of digital specialists in the Spanish economy, achieving gender parity in this group.
The Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation and the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Tourism, through the State Secretariat for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence and the EOI Foundation, attached to the Secretariat-General for Industry and SMEs, will have 53 training bodies to provide training programmes corresponding to the first call for training under the ‘Digital Generation’ programme, which is part of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan.
In this regard, the initiative includes the ‘Generation Digital SMEs’ programmes, which provide training and mentoring programmes for people in SME management teams with between 10 and 249 workers, to boost the digital transformation of their companies and thereby improve their productivity and growth and internationalisation potential, and the Generation Digital Actors of Change initiative, which provides training and mentoring for unemployed young people and SME workers to be the experts who will contribute to the process of digitalisation of SMEs.
The EOI Foundation is responsible for managing the planned investment for this initiative, which in its first call amounts to EUR 199 million (EUR 147,5 million for ‘Generation D SMEs’ and EUR 51,5 million for ‘Generation D Actors for Change’) from the Recovery Plan funds. This will train, in this first call, 56.740 people from SME management teams and 19.800 change agents (70 % young unemployed and 30 % young SME workers).
