This section presents an overview of national strategies, policies, and nationwide initiatives in digital skills area. They aim to promote and support digital skills development for ICT specialists, workforce, general citizens, and education systems for EU member states.
National Strategies
In the last 2 years, most of the member states have developed or updated a general country digitalization (digital growth or digital transformation) strategy setting goals for next 5 to 10 years. In these strategic documents digital skills is one of the key pillars together with other priorities of country’s digital transformation goals. The typical examples here are: Austria - E-Government Strategy 2023, Digital Bulgaria 2025, Digital Growth Strategy Denmark, Estonian Digital Agenda 2030, Germany’s Digital strategy 2025, Dutch digitization strategy 2.0, Latvian Digital Transformation Guidelines for 2021-2027, Digital transformation Strategy for Slovakia 2030, Digital Spain Agenda 2026, and some others.
In some of the EU member states there are dedicated standalone National Digital skills strategies. In Belgium, the national and intersectoral strategy Women in Digital 2021-2026 includes a common and intersectoral strategy based on five strategic objectives in order to combat current prejudices and to tackle structural obstacles which prevent women from participating in the digital economy. In Italy, in July 2020, the National Strategy for Digital Skills was defined, within a comprehensive framework, with four lines of intervention for students, active workforce, ICT specialists and citizens. In Malta, the National eSkills Strategy 2022-2025 sets very precise goals for digital skills development together with metric KPI’s. Portugal, in 2017, the Portuguese government established the National Digital Competences Initiative e.2030, Portugal INCoDe 2030, an integrated public policy to enhance and foster digital competences. In Slovakia, the government established the strategy Supporting the development of 5G networks in Slovakia for 2020-2025 with the vision to build a top-class 5G information and communication infrastructure and use the wide range of opportunities offered by this technology for the development of the Slovak society and economy.
In many EU member states digital skills development targets are integrated in general national education, industry digitalization or employment strategies and policies, such as Digital Workforce program Hungary, Lithuanian Digitalisation Roadmap 2019-2030, and National Digitalisation Strategy for the School System in Sweden 2023-2027. In Ireland, the Digital Strategy for Schools to 2027 was adopted by the Government with aim to further support the school system to ensure that all learners have the opportunity to gain the knowledge and skills they need to successfully navigate an ever-evolving digital world. In France, the Digital Strategy for Education 2023-2027 was established with the aim to strengthen students' digital skills and accelerate the use of digital tools for their success.
Recently, many countries have developed cyber security strategies. For example, Cybersecurity Strategy of the Republic of Poland 2019-2024, Latvia's Cybersecurity Strategy 2023-2026, Danish National Strategy for Cyber and Information Security 2022-2024, Slovak National Cybersecurity Strategy 2021-2025 and some others.
In addition, many countries have already developed AI strategies that are crucial for companies and organizations across various sectors. These strategies outline national goals, priorities, and initiatives to foster AI research, development, and implementation. Some examples are here: Slovenian national programme to promote the development and use of AI by 2025, Romanian National Digital Skills Programme for employees in the small and medium-sized enterprises, Strategy and Vision for Artificial Intelligence in Malta 2030, National Artificial Intelligence Strategy “AI Portugal 2030”, concept for the Development of Artificial Intelligence in Bulgaria until 2030, national Artificial Intelligence Strategy of the Czech Republic, French national Strategy for AI and others.
In this chapter, you can find a brief description of the National Digital Decade strategic roadmaps and the full documents, which were adopted by the European Commission and governments at the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024. Each roadmap details the adopted or planned actions up to 2030, in order to reach collectively the digital targets and general objectives set by the Digital Decade Policy Programme. These strategic roadmaps also contain the national projected trajectories, as well as the expected impact of the policies, measures and actions.
As EU member states constantly develop and approve new national strategies and plan to support and foster digital skills, this section will be continuously updated with the latest information.
