Abstract:

There is a need to be concerned about the availability of skilled labor in Finland. Already, before the COVID-19 pandemic, the shortage of skilled labor became a severe obstacle to companies' growth and a pillar of Finland's economic growth. The skills requirements of working life are changing at an ever-accelerating pace. Digitization and the rapid development of technology are changing the content of all work. Continuous, lifelong learning is strengthened as the norm of working life. Without diverse opportunities and motivation for continuous competence development, there is a threat of falling into the competence gap.

For over five years, TechClass directly supported IT students from university students and non-university students to equip them with the necessary skills and knowledge aligned with the IT industry requirements. TechClass helped them pursue their careers in the IT industry and received excellent feedback and satisfaction percentages from the students. So far, delivering our services was limited to offering individual courses to the degree students as part of their degree programme, or online courses via our university partners' Open University Programmes.

The knowledge achieved, together with promising results, gave us confidence and helped us design more in-depth expertise material. Now our training package educates, informs, and inspires. As a result, students receive full guidance and support to prepare for various IT roles and professions.

In this paper, we are going to discuss in more detail our plan for TechClass Digital Academy.

Keywords:

Digital Academy, Labor Market, IT industry, Employability, Digitalization, Continuous Learning.