On May 29th the National Coalition for Digital Skills and jobs was launched. The launch of the National Coalition is an initiative supported by the European Commission as part of the Digital Single Market – skills strategy.
In Luxembourg it’s coordinated by our partner LIDIT with the support of Digital Lëtzebuerg.
We are a stakeholder of the coalition and as part of the launch event, we hosted a workshop “How to include girls and women in ICT”.
Through this workshop, we discussed our different local and European projects as well as our future projects for 2017 in which WIDE (Women in Digital Empowerment) is taking action to boost digital skills in order to tackle the digital gap. Following this workshop we were able to make new contacts with companies and lycées to develop further our collaboration, especially in education.
Prime Minister Xavier Bettel, Claude Meisch Minister of National Education and Nicolas Schmit, Minister of Labour, were present at the main conference to emphasise the importance of digital education and training today and show their support to the actors of change.
We would like to report the important messages which were conveyed during the conference:
– Prime Minister Xavier Bettel said it was crucial that companies in Luxembourg join the efforts of the coalition, in providing trainings or internship opportunities for young people as a start. We cannot agree more with this. Companies need to get involved today if they want to find long-term solutions to fix the talent gap in ICT.
– Yuriko Backes, Chief of the representation of the EU Commission in Luxembourg also mentioned the importance of encouraging more girls and women to join the world of ICT, which is a priority at EU level.
– Isabelle Schlesser, Director of Adem said there were not enough women taking part in the Fit4Coding training scheme offered by the ADEM to retrain unemployed people to new jobs in IT.
– Claudine Kariger from Service Media et Communication – Ministère d’Etat thanked all the partners involved in the eskill projects with Digital Luxembourg including WIDE.
– One video featured a success story, Sihem, a Rails Girls participant turned coach who is an entrepreneur in the field of regtech. Sihem said that Rails Girls helped her to reconnect to the world of programming and technology but also allowed her to meet new people and connect to a network.
We were also pleased to see that the brochures & videos produced by Digital Luxembourg were gender balanced and featured success stories with both men & women.
