Go-Digital

Increasing adult educators’ competencies to encourage female employment in the digital sector of the labour market

Project No. 2019-1-LT01-KA204-060723
Project Start Date: 01-11-2019
Project End Date: 31-12-2021
Duration: 26 months

https://www.facebook.com/godigitalerasmusproject/

EU study “Women in Digital Age” (2016) shows that women are under-represented in digital sector as women represent only 21.5% of all workers. The importance of the jobs in digital sector is increasing in EU during the last years; however, women are afraid to choose the jobs in the digital sector.

Some of the reasons why women are not taking training to enter the employment in digital sector are defined as a lack of inspiration and role models. In 2018, EC outlined strategy “Women in Digital” to implement actions to facilitate an increase in participation of women in the digital sector, including education to combat gender stereotypes, to enable, encourage and motivate female to participate in the digital sector of the labour market.

The project Go-Digital seeks to contribute to the implementation of this EU strategy through education.

The project also contributes to achieve Europe 2020 benchmarks: to increase employment rate by 75%; to raise the participation of adults in lifelong learning by 15%.

The project aim:
Encourage recognition of adult educators’ competences to be a coach for motivating disadvantaged women to get employment in the digital sector.

Main objectives:

1. To develop adult educators’ competences in motivating disadvantaged women to take part in learning towards employment in the digital sector of the labour market.
2. To improve recognition and support validation of competences acquired through non-formal training course “Coach on female employment in the digital sector in order to promote gender equality in the labour market” by using assessment tool and digital badge.
3. To promote gender equality in the access to learning and use of employment in the digital sector by female learners.

Direct target groups:

• Adult educators-coaches (120 adult educators will be involved in the piloting)
• Women with disadvantaged backgrounds and fewer opportunities (72 female learners will be trained)

To achieve the project’s aim and objectives, three intellectual outputs are produced:

• O1 – Training program for adult educators “Coaching for female employment in the digital sector in order to promote gender equality in the labour market”.
• O2 – Assessment tool to recognise the adult educators-coaches competencies and provide them with the digital badges.
• O3 – Set of Open Educational Resources for women: “Why re-qualification for employment in the digital sector is important for me?”.

The main result of O1 is a MOOC which allows to organise the flexible e-learning for adult-educators coaches within the flipped learning classroom. Six core competences of adult educators-coaches are developed within three modules of the MOOC:

1. Gender equality in the learning environment and in the labour market.
2. Digital sector – new opportunities for women’s progress towards the higher qualifications and better position in the labour market.
3. Effective coaching and motivation strategies to increase demand and take up of re-qualifications of disadvantaged women into digital sector of the labour market.

The MOOC is finalised by self-assessment of the coach’s competences.

Assessment tool (O2) consists of at least 30 situation-based programmed questions and after the successful fulfilment of it, the learners get the digital badge “Coach on female employment in the digital sector in order to promote gender equality in the labour market” and are prepared to start the coaching of disadvantaged women.

O3 targets disadvantaged women and consists of four OERs:

1. Digital stories “Successful women in digital sector of labour market”
2. Interactive readings “ABC on gender equality in the labour market”
3. Compendium of (re-)training programs for qualifications in digital sector of labour market
4. Action plan “My further steps into employment in digital sector”.

O3 is used by coaches as well as a toolkit for the coaching process.

Methodology used for the production of the outputs: MOOC, OERs and programmed assessment test. Methodology for providing trainings is based on blended-learning approach within the flipped classroom, one-to-one and one-to-group coaching using enquiry learning method.

The impact envisaged on both target groups:

1. at least 70% of adult educators increase the level of their competences to become coaches and get the digital badge;
2. at least 60% of women with fewer opportunities and disadvantaged background, after getting high-quality coaching, are motivated to set up their learning goals and develop the actions’ plan for further steps to enter the digital jobs.

Produced within the project the MOOC, Assessment tool and Set of OERs for women are freely available in the project's web-site and promoted through Creative Commons License for non-commercial use.