Digital Skills: How to Catch Up with Change? | Huawei European Talks

Hello and welcome to another Huawei European Talks. Today our guest is Dr Costas Argyrides, the Ambassador of Cyprus for the European Vocational Skills Week for the European Commission.

Hi Costas.

Hello, thank you for inviting me.

Today’s discussion will be about the importance of digital skills and how organisations work together to tackle digital skills mismatches and gaps in Europe. But before we start, I would like Costas to describe and explain the purpose and this initiative by the European Commission which is the European Vocational Skills Week.

Yes of course. So, European Vocational Skills Week or VET week as we call it has been running for the last five years now. The European Commission would like to introduce the VET education to people who don’t know what it is, people who are biased or they have prejudice by thinking that students from vocational education are second-class or that the education level is lower than the regular schools. So, they introduced this week to highlight this fact that VET schools have the same level of education and that actually students from VET schools, they can get to their job quicker than the regular school education.

Thank you, Costas. So just to clarify also for our audience that VET stands for Vocational Education and Training. So as Ambassador of Cyprus for the EU Vocational Skills Week, we would also like you later on to describe more about this. Could you please tell us, why do you think that digital skills are important nowadays?

We have seen that because of Covid, the digital skills are very important; people are mostly working from home, they try to do everything from their sofas. So, if you don’t have any digital skills, you cannot do anything: you cannot go to the supermarket- even in Cyprus during the time that we were locked at home, nobody could go outside so we had to buy everything online, you had to use the internet for everything, to pay taxes, to buy stuff – everything. You had to do it from your PC, so, if you didn’t have any digital skills, it was very difficult.

Thank you, Costas. What you just described was very insightful and I would like to know also, according to you, which digital skills are most important nowadays?

Well, artificial intelligence and all these things are very important because of the progress of technology and the new cars and the way that they are progressing. During the time that we are going through now with Covid, in this period, simple digital skills. So, somebody who knows how to use a computer and how to use the Internet. That’s very important but of course, artificial intelligence, blockchain, all these things are very important not just for now during this difficult period that everyone is going through due to Covid, but for the future of the world.

Thank you very much, Costas, for this reply. And now we would like to ask you, do you think that the digital skills gap exists in the EU? How would you characterise this phenomenon?

Yes, actually there is a digital skills gap within the EU. We can see for example in my country and in my role as Ambassador, I can see that people are not even using their cards to pay and even before Covid, people did not know how to use technology, they didn’t know how to use a smartphone but now because of Covid, they have started using their smartphones, they have started using technology but there is a gap and this is an enormous gap. We have to do some work on this, and this is what European Vocational Skills Week is working on and I believe this is the theme for the 2020 European Vocational Skills Week- digital skills. How people can obtain more digital skills and how to close this gap.

So then, thank you very much, Costas. I would like to know also from you, what change do you see when you look at the adoption of digital skills? What efforts are organisations putting together in order to help people either upskill or reskill? And what is your organisation in particular, and your role as Ambassador for the European Vocational Skills Week, do on this?

I can see the European Commission using the VET week; I mean, they designed the Vocational Training Week to help people understand and teach them how to do that. They have ambassadors that they are using in every European country as role models to help the local directors of the VET schools to promote vocational education and training. The European Commission have shown clearly how important digital skills are for the future, that’s why I’m trying to promote digital skills using the event week.

What do you think are the challenges in helping equip people with the right digital skills?

It depends on how well they work in the digital space. If they know anything at all, it depends on the age mostly because youngsters, they are born with digital skills. They use a tablet, they use a phone, they know how to use technology. There are some challenges because of the human factors but it’s not difficult to teach people digital skills. It’s their everyday life. For example, in Cyprus last year or a couple of years ago, they decided that the tax system is going online. No one has a paper tax form. Everything has to go online so this forced people to go online. So, they forced people to develop digital skills to do their taxes. Some people pay, but sooner or later everybody will know how to do that. They push them to have digital skills and this is what Covid did to us. Covid pushed everybody to improve our digital skills, the companies to improve how they work, and they had to improve their technology.

Indeed, the current situation and the way it pushed people to reflect on the way that they handle things online, as you said, it forced people to do everything in a digital format, from online shopping to online education. So, indeed this was the case actually in the current unfortunate context of the current pandemic. Well, it’s been great having you as a guest on Huawei European Talks today Costas.

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