Women4IT - Lithuania
The project 'Women4IT' was launched in 2018 with one objective: to support the development of digital skills especially for younger women looking for work, thereby improving their employability. The project's mission is to contribute to the creation of attractive and sustainable jobs, with a focus on young people, help structure and improve diversity in the IT sector, and work with recruiters to test innovative solutions and bring more women into employment. The project concluded in January 2024, after 4 successful years of implementation across several EU countries.
Indeed, a huge strength is the multi-country perspective of the project: it was implemented in Lithuania and another 8 partner countries: Latvia, Spain, Greece, Norway, Romania, Ireland, Malta and Belgium.
Mapping the digital profiles of the future
One of the key elements of the project is the development of a new online tool to assess participants’ digital competences, compare available skills and profiles of the digital jobs offered, and offer the most appropriate learning programme. Participants then have the opportunity to complete courses depending on the digital profile they are interested in embarking upon. The project also mapped available offers, digital and labour trends in the Lithuanian Digital Labour Market Survey, identifying 8 key digital job profiles:
- Customer service specialist
- Test and user support officer
- Project coordinator
- Data analyst
- Data protection specialist
- Web developer
- Graphic designer
- Digital media specialist
Women4IT - the Lithuanian experience
The training phase of the Women4IT project in Lithuania ran from February to March 2021, with the support of the Baltic Institute of Educational Technology (Beti) together with the Training Organisation Group. Over the course of this 1 month, 100 Lithuanians completed successfully a training programme of 160 hours.
As a result of the Lithuanian Digital Labour Market Survey, girls started their training with one of the four potential digital professions identified as project coordinators, customer service specialists, junior web developers or data analysts. The job profile of a customer service professional, whose training was completed by 41 girls, was the most popular one. In the second place ended up the project coordinator, training 25 girls. The young web developer’s job profile, which was successfully completed by 23 girls, received almost the same level of attention. In the meantime, only 11 girls chose the profile of a data analyst, but they also successfully responded to it and completed their training in a timely manner. It is worth mentioning that all training courses took place remotely, and the global pandemic has only proved that these specialities are more demanding than ever.
One trainee, Sandra Kirgetovaitė, decided to take part in the training. She was interested in seeing how web-building is progressing: “This is a new challenge for myself whether I will be able to understand and teach this innovation”. Sandra chose to study the junior web creator and successfully completed it. Sandra itself stated after the training that distance education did not complicate or understand the quality of studies, but facilitated entry into the labour market and opened up new learning opportunities. Sandra argues that she would also recommend this training to her acquaintances: 'In particular, the course extends the horizon. Secondly, such training helps to understand how changes are taking place in the modern tech world. And the knowledge gained here is enough to create your own web page.”
Towards the end of the project, we had the opportunity to extend the project’s activities to include more girls in the digital world. We will seek to further facilitate user access to the platform by providing new tools and targeted mentoring choices.
The learning paths, digital job profiles and other project resources can be downloaded too via the official portal.
