Abstract:

The need to make several transitions, as such green sustainability and digitalization, emphasised by initiatives like achieving a climate-neutral economy and addressing the impacts of COVID-19, reveals the urgent need to reshape the skill sets of the global workforce. The European Commission identifies this paradigm shift as crucial for enhancing sustainable competitiveness, ensuring social equity, and bolstering societal resilience. The Visible Skills (VISKI) consortium – an Erasmus+ funded project, is actively committed to fostering and showcasing 21st century skills (21st CS) for the different settings of learning, but focused on informal and non-formal, as these are highly relevant in current fast changing times. The concepts of learning follow the definitions by the European commission for personal advancement and employability, contributing to societal prosperity through ongoing learning experiences. With the ambition to facilitate the skills paradigm shift, the Visible Skills Portfolio (VISKIO) is being developed. VISKIO actively employs a strategy emphasizing transversal skills and competencies, primarily through challenges, enabling users to effectively demonstrate their abilities. Challenges, integral to our platform, actively facilitate skill acquisition and demonstration, resulting from the different types of learning. The study intends to develop a platform that has the potential to become a European-wide vehicle to foster and showcase individual 21st CS, fostering collaboration between individuals, education and industry, to actively preparing individuals for future employment opportunities. Additionally, this study aims to understand the potential of the strategy Challenge-based Learning (CBL), especially in informal and non-formal learning contexts. The development of the VISKIO platform is in progress and includes testing it in both formal and informal education and business settings as well as for individual use. Testing includes performance and relevance for the target groups, namely, professionals, students, teachers and HR and management staff. The adoption of the VISKIO platform would benefit learner development and showcasing of 21st CS, educational institutions in its ability to support formal and non-formal learning of these skills set and the labour market in challenging and/or observing specific-needed skills. For the labour market, the advantages, include recruitment processes by offering an additional instrument to find talent with specific skills set that is not identifiable by current practice and channels, and support employees and potential employees in developing and demonstrating their skills beyond formal certification and job titles for better employment opportunities and career development. The paper describes how the interactive platform will be realized and the results to date even as the project is still in development.

Keywords:

21st Century Skills, informal learning, non-formal learning, challenge-based learning.