In the beginning of March 2021 the Skills4Cities Bulgarian partners IBS and CSKC laid the grounds of a common initiative inspired by the Skills4Cities project and in favour of the sustainability of the project’s results and the impact it aims to achieve – a Center for Competencies for Innovation Management and Smart Cities.
The Center will focus on the preparation of human capital in accordance with the European Skills Agenda with an emphasis on skills in managing innovation and deep technologies for digital transformation and smart cities. At the heart of the initiative is the most important building block of any smart city, namely the "smart city project". This will be the first specialized Competencies Center in the Bulgaria, which will upgrade and certify skills, knowledge, and abilities directly related to the new professions, so necessary for the cities of the future. The initiative envisages offering lifelong and specialized training to expand and improve the professional qualification and skills for technology management, innovation, and projects for smart cities. The target group is the innovative professional community, which includes employees and managers, experts, consultants, mentors, urban planners, economists, architects, engineers, geologists, cartographers, lawyers, as well as technicians working in the ICT sectors, etc. who, by upskilling with new competencies and subsequent certification, will claim knowledge and skills in the management and implementation of various types and sizes of the smart cities projects. After the completion of the Skills4Cities project, the Center will have the necessary resources to prepare and certify the first three new job roles. 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). 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. 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 ImpactsConsidering 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
IO2 - Validation tools for smart city competencies
Project Impact and SustainabilityAll 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.
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. 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. |
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February 2023
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