SMACITE’s first workshop Smart Development: Unleashing Skills for Future-Ready Cities & Communities

SMACITE’s first workshop Smart Development: Unleashing Skills for Future-Ready Cities & Communities held online on September 20th was a success!

The event, organized by the project partner DIGITAL SME, gathered more than 60 stakeholders in the smart cities sector. Representatives of EU institutions, education providers, VET, public authorities and businesses (solutions' providers) joined the event and participated in the breakout sessions to facilitate connections among peers around Europe. SMACITE project's findings on technical and soft skills for smart cities engineers and technicians were concretely presented by the project partners Universidad de Alcalà and University of Patras.

The essential skills for both roles have already been identified. As a result, it has been highlighted that designing and developing specifications and solutions for infrastructure with optimization is an essential skill for smart city engineers, while installing and maintaining automation systems, connected and smart devices, but also acting as user educator and service recommender is crucial for smart city technicians. In general, the project confirmed the higher relevance of knowledge over skills in the profile of engineers while the profile of the  technicians shows the opposite focus on practice and skills over knowledge.

The engineer and technician profiles have been drafted with reference to the e-Competence framework for ICT related jobs and are mapped to ESCO labor classification. The data collected until now show that both of them mainly require a mix of technical and green skills, but an engineer needs stronger business and management skills, together with soft skills. As next steps, SMACITE project will launch open calls to pilot the MOOCs developed based on the project findings on pivotal skills for smart cities engineers and technicians.

Mariana Furtado (Communication Officer - DG CNECT) gave an overview of the policy framework towards sustainable smart cities and communities, focusing on the Living-in EU initiative. Her presentation was complemented by Marek Bobis (Policy officer - European Committee of the Regions), that presented the LORDIMAS tool, a local digital maturity assessment instrument that could support EU cities in their digital transition. The tool launch event LORDIMAS: your digital maturity check will be held within the EU week of Regions on October 11th, from 10:30 to 10:45 in The Square (room Agora 1).

The breakout sessions created sinergies with other EU funded projects, through the presentation of AURORAL Project Pilots in Penedès (ES), Southern Burgenland (AT) and Halogaland (NO) and of the Auroral Academy. Training providers, businesses and municipalities, including SMACITE partners, also had the chance to enhance new partnerships by presenting their organisations in the pitching session.

Would you like to know more about Smart Development: Unleashing Skills for Future-Ready Cities & Communities workshop? You can find the recording of the event together with all the presentations on the event page.

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