SKills4Cities project kick off

On the 13th of November 2020 the Skills4Cities project  (Smart Skills for Smarter Cities, No: 2020-1-BG01-KA202-079071) kicked-off with an online meeting hosted by the project coordinator Cluster Sofia Knowledge City - CSKC (Bulgaria) and all project partners: ARIES Transilvania (Romania), ECQA (Austria), GAIA (Spain), IBS (Bulgaria) and IDEC (Greece).
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The project implementation will continue 24 months and is funded under the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union. Erasmus+ is the EU's programme to support education, training, youth and sport in Europe.
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During the kick off meeting the partners agreed on an agenda that would focus on producing quality intellectual outputs and would result in the development of a three job profiles targeting the smart cities projects – the “building block” of any smart city. 

What is Skills4Cities about?

​The main objective of the project is to develop and test learning and validation tools for the training of experts, personnel and managers of smart city projects for their newly emerging roles.

Skills4Cities Results and Impacts

​Considering the emerging technologies and the digital transformation of the cities the urban management requires new competencies that the education systems provide currently quite fragmented. In this respect the core activities of the project are focused on the development of two so called intellectual outputs (IO): 

IO1 - Toolkit for smart city competencies framework

• Smart City Competencies Map - a competence model, based on the desk fast-track study of good available practices.
• Reference Competencies Framework - a description of the competencies that the smart cities administration needs.
• VET Curriculum – skills for the smart city projects implementation with the related learning materials and tests.
• User Guide for implementation - a peer-to-peer teaching guide for the learners and trainers.

The toolkit has the potential to be recognized as a European Reference Framework for recruitment, training or retraining of smart city personnel. It aims to cover training including non-formal learning and to be sufficiently specific and a referent for the city governance, VET providers, stakeholders, and learners. It could be adapted to the concrete circumstances of any city, in which it is used, and this could be a great impact on the effectiveness of the smart cities in Europe.

IO2 - Validation tools for smart city competencies

• Guidelines for Validation of competencies for a smart city administration which clarify the basic features of validation and identifies and recommends referent phases of this process.
• Rules for Certification of smart city roles that describe the process of examination, certification, and recognition of the competences acquired in the training of the target groups based on the framework elaborated under this project.

The purpose of both, the validation Guidelines and the Rules for certification, is to make possible the implementation and the sustainability of the impact of IO1 - Toolkit for smart cities competencies framework. The validation tool will be a unified certification schema for the smart city professions, it will support the definition and development of the competencies required for smart city job roles, will define and verify quality criteria for training organizations and trainers to assure the same level of training all over Europe and will serve as a centralized instrument for promoting all certified job roles in the interested smart cities. 

Project Impact and Sustainability

All project results will be available in all partner languages (5) and in English, facilitating this way their use even by stakeholders in non-participating countries. All materials will be accessible through the project website for free.
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The project impact envisages a rise of awareness on the new roles of the cities' staff regarding the smart city-related challenges and increasing the efficiency of the cities as a result of an improved competencies of the HR of the cities. The last will be a result of a certified training based on the new competencies framework and the training curricula and materials, elaborated under the project.
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A potential longer-term benefit could be considered the opportunity to link the reference competencies framework and the validation mechanism for recruitment, training or retraining of personnel working on smart city projects, to the national and European qualification systems and to have it recognized on national and European levels.