Digital skills have been recognised as one of the eight key competences for lifelong learning, and basic digital literacy is needed for the majority of jobs. Yet many young people lack the required digital skillset to take full advantage of ICT in their education, to find work and/or to create their own employment.
With a high percentage of unemployed youth in Europe today, young people are at risk of social and economic exclusion due to the lack of competent and meaningful digital skills. The recognition that digital inclusion boosts youth employability and entrepreneurship and that attainment of digital skills is key to access to the labour market in a knowledge based economy has already been made by political leaders and ICT learning and inclusion for young people has been promoted in various documents such as the European Youth Strategy, The Youth Employment Initiative and Youth Opportunities Initiative, the EU Flagship initiatives for smart growth: Youth on the Move and Digital Agenda for Europe. In the last years the ICT for Learning and Inclusion research group at JRC-IPTS, has documented the collective need expressed by both ICT for learning and ICT for inclusion stakeholders to count on a sectoral stakeholder platform as a space for collaboration, knowledge sharing and development of new partnerships.
The nature of the challenges and the topics at hand (ICT for education and for inclusion) call for a collaborative approach between a wide variety of stakeholders: civil society organisations, education providers, governments, international and EU institutions, private companies and end beneficiaries. No single actor can address these challenges. The complexity therefore calls for a collaborative platform where education and inclusion issues can be discussed together, hand in hand.
I-LINC’s main objective is to establish a sustainable, overarching platform for ICT (for) learning and inclusion focused on boosting the employability of young people. Beyond the technical meaning of “platform” (in the sense of an online environment for networking, participation and learning), it primarily refers here to the ambition of consolidating a committed and active community of stakeholders working in ICT (for) learning and inclusion to boost young people’s employability.
In the context of ICT (for) learning and inclusion, the consortium focuses on ICT learning and eInclusion of young people as one of the main drivers for increasing their employability and entrepreneurship. The platform aims to achieve this in a two-folded manner:
• on one hand, it includes those learning and inclusion actors, institutions and organisations oriented towards young people;
• on the other, it sensitizes and encourages those stakeholders with a broader scope about the needs and possibilities of youth in the digital society/economy.
