Abstract:

Education has multiple aims. It should develop knowledge, literacy, skills, and the ability to adapt to the environment around us from the beginning of primary school. Approaching the end of secondary education, an essential new aim that emerges is to prepare for the labour market or higher education.

How is education? Can it fulfil these aims? The Lifelong Learn concept was integrated into the strategy of the EU, and the EU prepared some programs and a platform to support this [1]. In addition, the EU defined the necessary key competencies based on the labour market expectations.

This paper focuses on IT education. It investigates the relationship between Digital Competencies and the expectations of employers. This paper compares the digital competencies of the EU, the curricula of some countries from Europe, the specializations at IT programs of Universities, and the skills that are needed for the most wanted IT jobs. It is looking for the widening gaps between education and business expectations. Although the COVID-19 pandemic made a breakthrough in digital literacy, education primarily focuses on the user-level digital environment, while it barely focuses on algorithmic skills. An essential demand towards education is to develop computational thinking; a useful skill for general problem solving and not only just for computer programming. The skills of decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction, and algorithmization are important for several subjects, especially STEM subjects, but these are usable in literature or economics. The present challenges and the future forecasts confirm the necessity of gaining algorithmic skills for the wider group of students. To achieve this aim, the curricula must be developed, while experiential learning and talent searching and managing require more attention from the educational systems.

Keywords:

Computational thinking, labour market expectations, digital literacy, education.