The week-long Telecentre Europe’s flagship initiative European Get Online Week 2015 came to an end. National partners of the campaign generated ample participation in activities primarily targeting young and unemployed people, but also other audiences (e.g. immigrants, elderly, disabled, etc.). European GOW 2015 was organised on March 23-29 as part of eSkills for Jobs to get people online and digitally competent, with the financial support of Microsoft and Liberty Global.
Participation across Europe
A boost in awareness raising on digital inclusion and digital skills for jobs echoed in at least 25 countries in Europe and beyond. As Mr. Andrus Ansip, the Vice-president of the European Commission, put it in his latest blogpost, “events like Get Online Week are a great way to promote tech as a career. They are also about informing, encouraging and empowering people.”
Latvian GOW 2015: singing about digital skills and e-services
Telecentre Europe and its national partners used multiple tools to register the campaign participants across Europe. Initial estimations show that well over 50,000 Europeans have been involved, with data already processed for almost 40,000 (a full campaign report with final figures and statistics will be published at the end of April 2015). Most active countries were Latvia (holding the Presidency of the Council of the European Union), Russia, Romania, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Serbia, Spain, Greece and Hungary.
More than half reached – students and young people
Training activities in Spain
From data already processed, we can see that young women and girls aged 16-24 and students were the most active audience in GOW activities. A bit more than 51% of participants were women, while two thirds were young people by the age of 24. More than half of respondents throughout the countries (almost 53% or over 15,500) were students.
Many partners organised and involved youngsters in various trainings and workshops about benefits of social media, potential of ICT careers, educational robotics and coding, among few. Two online platforms – YouRock.jobs and Skillage.eu – were popular employability tools promoted to young participants. YouRock is a free, multi-language, employability networking tool, while Skillage is an online tool that helps young people to understand the more sophisticated ICT skills needed for the job market.
GOW 2015 in Germany: Young people get empowered with YouRock
In Germany, TE member Stiftung Digitale Chancen collaborated with Christian Schenk (former Olympics medallist) and his youth organisation ‘Erkenne deine Stärken’ to offer an employability workshop for young people focusing on YouRock platform. The event took place in the German National Olympic Training Centre in Kienbaum. Association Langas į ateitį (Lithuania) and El Teb (Spain) also run workshops and seminars on creating online portfolios with YouRock. Thanks to GOW 2015, YouRock.jobs saw an increase of 3,000 new users in just one week!
11 students of the Technical University Dortmund took the initiative to prepare ICT related courses for institutions around the urban area of Dortmund. The director of the City of Dortmund Economic Development Agency committed himself as patron of the GOW Dortmund 2015 and underlined the importance of digital competences for the Dortmund labour market in a kick off meeting held on March 21.
Kraljevo School in Serbia run interactive activities for its students to use digital technology in new – creative – ways. Over 100 events were tailored to young people in Russia and two country-wide contests have been launched as part of GOW 2015. Telecentre Danmark facilitated e-skills testing using Skillage at the TEC (a technical education center in Copenhagen) for young people aged between 18 to 29 years old who are currently studying for their ICT certification.
A meeting with young people in Albanian high school
Albanian Institute of Science organized a meeting with young people in a high school in Tirana to encourage them consider studying in ICT fields as their specialists are sought after by the labour market. A three-day RomeCup 2015, dedicated to schools, universities and companies to showcase robotics and network, was the highlight of Italian GOW this year, attracting some 3,000 participants.
Many activities for the unemployed
The unemployed was one of the key GOW targets this year. Preliminary numbers show that at least 7% of unemployed people were involved in the campaign activities. Foundation for Community Network in Hungary organised a series of presentations on finding a job with the help of social media. In Poland Activation Foundation supported FRSI and organized a Career Counselling Day for unemployed people under 30.
Career Counselling Day in Poland
Young unemployed people were targeted in Lithuania, where Association Langas į ateitį addressed the issue of online reputation building and its importance for job search. A similar topic was tackled by Unioncamere and Camera di Commercio di Bologna (Chambers of commerce) in Italy who organised a 2-hour event about how to manage digital identity/reputation on social media and how this affects recruitment processes.
Skillage.eu that aims to guide (young) people to get ready for employment by testing their skills was promoted by many national partners. About 7,000 Skillage tests were taken during one week of GOW 2015.
GOW 2015 on social media
1,600+ tweets with hashtag #GOW15 were sent out by more than 700 Twitter users in seven days of the campaign. Among the most influential and engaging users spreading the word about GOW 2015 on Twitter we saw the European Commission’s Vice-President for the Digital Single Market Andrus Ansip, the EU Digital Agenda, the European Commission, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), eSkills for Jobs, Digital Champion in Austria Meral Akin-Hecke, and Texthelp for Work.
Other active TE member organisations on social media include Digidel represented by Linda Sandberg (Sweden), Pane e Internet/ERVET (Italy), Fondazione Mondo Digitale (Italy), and Geh’ online Woche (Germany). The potential reach of this year’s tweets on GOW 2015 is almost 4 million. 50 messages about the campaign were posted and shared by Telecentre Europe on Facebook reaching over 3,000 users and resulting in almost 8,000 impressions.
Check GOW 2015 Twitter story on Storify!
Check more publications on GOW 2015:
- Andrus Ansip (European Commission): Digital skills, jobs and the need to get more Europeans online
- Alexa Joyce (Microsoft): Empowering a Generation with Digital Skills
- Lucilla Sioli (European Commission): Here is how we will improve digital skills and create more jobs in Europe
- Ramune Petuchovaite (EIFL): Public libraries rising to the challenges of the digital era
- eSkills for Jobs: Europe, Digital Skills, and the Digital Single Market
- Presswire: Getting Europe online, the digital empowerment campaign
Note: numbers given on participants in countries during the GOW 2015 are only first estimates and are not final yet. Telecentre Europe is collecting more data from its partners and will announce final figures in the upcoming campaign report.
In Romania 166 organisations have joined the campaign locally known as Hai pe Net! organised by EOS Romania. Libraries are very active contributors to the campaign and 
municipalities in the country. High-level opening of the campaign took place on Monday involving policy makers, Digital Champion and industry leaders. Online discussion with innovative teachers was organised to address the development of e-skills for our digital natives (starting from 3 years of age). Tuesday was dedicated to present YouRock.jobs to youngsters, Wednesday saw digital events for SMEs. 
In Germany Stiftung Digitale Chancen is collaborating with TU Dortmund to run GOW country-wide. So far many courses and trainings took place in some schools in Dortmund on cybermobbing, safe use of Facebook, basic skills of PC, all organised by student volunteers. In Berlin primary schools kids had a chance to learn SCRATCH programming language to build their first games. 
