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Online Employability Toolkit Launch

By Lasa Information Systems Team

The ‘Online Employability Toolkit’ is designed to help digitally-excluded people gain new skills for employment, including CV building, online job hunting and social media skills.

The Toolkit was developed by a partnership of five organisations across Europe (KC4All - the Key Competencies for All Project) which included Lasa in the UK.

Over 9 million still not online in the UK

According to Telecentre-Europe, an estimated 290 million people in Europe still lack basic IT skills, and in the UK an estimated 9.4 million adults are still not using computers and the internet (see UK Online Centre’s report, Digital engagement - understanding customers).

With the labour market progressively favouring those with computer skills and internet experience, the Toolkit was developed to help address a digital divide which is increasingly excluding people from job opportunities.

Pedro Aguilera Cortez, the Project Manager from Fundacion Esplai in Spain regards the Toolkit as “a vital resource at this difficult time and we will make sure that the thousands of online centres across Europe are equipped to deal with their customers’ employability needs over the coming years.”

Open source and Creative Commons

The intention is to enable end users to develop ICT skills, a ‘learning to learn’ attitude, a sense of initiative, as well as interpersonal and social skills. By going through the workshops and working in a group, end users will improve their competencies. KC4All also provides Online Centre facilitators and teachers with a set of structured online tools and workshops.

The toolkit has been developed using the open source WordPress content management system and come in 5 languages – French, English, Latvian, Romanian and Spanish. It has been licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.

The Toolkit (freely accessible) and more information on the project is available from KC4All.