Austria - digitaleberufe.at Career Guidance Platform
More than 24.000 IT specialists are lacking in Austria, and Europe-wide there will be a shortage of an additional 11 million IT specialists in the next 8 years. The online platform digitalberufe.at provides information and orientation about digital professions and contains a wide range of job profiles as well as a multimedia insight into the world of digital professions and its future.
The Career guidance platform digitalberufe.at is an initiative of the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research, the Internetoffensive Österreich and whatchado GmbH. This resulted in a guidance platform for digital professions that provides information about the entire range of digital occupational fields. Thus, the platform contributes to increase the awareness about digital job opportunities in Austria and to promote interest in digital professions.
Background and main acitvities
According to a Eurostat survey, 55% of companies have already experienced difficulties in recruiting and employing ICT professionals in 2019. The reasons for this are lacking applications, no sufficient qualifications and diverging salary expectations. These developments potentially affect the competitiveness of EU Member States.
Information and career guidance in digital professions are essential measures to counteract the problem. They form the core of digitalberufe.at. In doing so, the website specifically addresses the following questions:
- In which sectors are the respective professions represented?
- What are the future prospects of the individual professions?
- What skills are needed to work in the occupational field in demand?
The platform is aimed at the following target groups:
- Teachers: they receive information for the classroom as well as free downloadable teaching materials to creatively introduce pupils to digital professions.
- Pupils: they are offered an orientation guide with practical insights into digital professions.
- Parents: they receive access to the topic of digital professions and insights into professions of the future.
As an orientation platform, the portal uses a matching function to show exactly those opportunities that match the user's interests. Users have to answer fourteen short questions about the current interests, and then receive relevant videos. These videos contain stories of people who work in digital professions.
The content is divided into the occupational fields of Design and Development, Operation & Security and Digital Applications. Within these categories, there are descriptions of the occupational fields, future prospects, starting salaries and training paths.
In addition, documents in PDF format are available for teachers to download. These describe the different professions and suggest suitable tasks for pupils.
Why is this a good practice? Scope, structure, and multimodality
The portal digitaleberufe.at provides self-directed individual use but can also be used in the context of career orientation courses or in the classroom. This promotes the intensive use and wide scope of the portal, which is characterised by a high degree of transparency and multimedia content: Videos give a lively insight into the respective occupational situation, and the information is structured and thoroughly elaborated: Within the three occupational fields of "Design & Development", "Operation & Security" and "Digital Applications", the platform describes future prospects, starting salaries and training paths.
This increases the general knowledge about various professions and promotes the acquisition of future IT professionals.
