Abstract:

Digital freelancing combines working on a project-by-project basis for a variety of companies or for multiple clients with the use of digital skills and entrepreneurial abilities. Facilitated by the impact of the digital surge during the Covid-19 pandemic, the sector of independent remote work is the fastest-growing segment of the European labor market and is set to become the US majority workforce by 2027 . Despite this trend, which has been apparent since the early 2000s, students are not well informed about freelance job opportunities and are even less informed about how to seek self-employment.
Digital Freelancing for Higher Education (shortened to DiFree) is an Erasmus Plus project engaging a consortium of five European Universities which aims to disseminate information especially among graduating students and recent graduates about self-employed occupations, which are increasingly performed online and more and more dependent on continuous learning and skill development, and about how to succeed in those professions in Europe with the help of DiFree tools, among which are insiders’ and mentor’s advice and freelance hubs.
The purpose of the article is therefore twofold: to outline the project’s expected results and to focus on one of its major outputs – the creation of an online collector of freely usable multilingual CV/ Resume/ Portfolio templates (most of which will be available in English) for freelance, digital, remote jobs.
Besides being a graphical user interface and relational database containing information on where to find a job (freelance contractors’ platforms, communities and job search sites) and tips on how to write an attractive CV/Resume, an effective portfolio and a convincing multimodal self-presentation for a job offer, the digital repository will be an open educational resource allowing language skill development with its multilingual glossaries of key career and job-hunting terms and appropriate phraseology, and collection of annotated CV/ Resume/Portfolio models and interactive self-assessment exercises.

Keywords:

Digital Freelancing, DigComp, EntreComp, e-learning digital library, content repository, CMS (Course Management System) design, LSP (language for special purposes) learning.