Developing emerging Smart Cities job profiles

The SMACITE project aims to address the skills gap of Smart Cities technicians and engineers, by designing and testing a vocational education and training program. The first essential step for guiding all the activities of the project is the development of two Smart Cities professional role profiles for Smart Cities Technicians and Engineers, always mapping them to the ESCO labour classification (compulsory in all EU countries since 2021) and to the standard EN16234-1:2019 for ICT professional competences, also known as e-Competence Framework.
 
The process for developing these two profiles has been detailed and precise with steps for systematic review of existing references, analysis of 10 case studies in several countries, focus groups of experts for mapping and extracting skills from/to ESCO and e-CF, etc. The star activity of this study has been an online survey addressed to all relevant types of stakeholders in the context of Smart Cities projects: clients (e.g., municipality staff and technicians), providers (e.g., engineers and managers of solution provider) and user/citizens (e.g., representatives of citizens and independent experts).
 
The online survey was implemented in the EU Survey tool of European Commission in four languages: English, Spanish, Italian and Greek. Open from end of July until 18th September, there was 394 visits to the questionnaire which led to 134 full responses from 11 European countries although countries with more contributions were Spain (34.07%), Greece (16.30%), Bulgaria (27.41%) and Italy (13.33%).
 
The analysis of the results from survey together with the interview to five experts of different countries which has helped to interpret the data will lead to the final professional profiles for Smart Cities Engineer and Technician. The profiles will guide the development of training resources along the next stages of Work Package 2.