Our pledge in the Digital Skills and Jobs Coalition

Building on our work in the European Alliance for Apprenticeships, on Active Digital Citizenship with the Council of Europe, and various projects on empowering parents, ParENTrepreneurs being one of them, Parents International has made a pledge in the EU’s Digital Skills and Jobs Coalition that has just been approved. We have learnt that the European Commission particularly appreciated our pledge for the new and Europe-wide approach, as well as the novel use of existing tools.

As you all know, parenting is one of the most complex activities of people and also a job most people do at some point in their lives. Research and experience shows that parents gain a lot of knowledge, skills and competences through parenting in different walks of life, some specific, some transversal. By raising awareness of these skills, supporting their development as well as the recognition and validation of skills, we can create an opportunity for people to use their parenting skills in the labour market. This is beneficial for people who wish to change their career paths as well as low skilled adults. Parents are raising their children in the digital age, and this experience offers a rich basis for skills and competence development for a digital reality, too. By brining together work we have been doing in different projects and initiatives, we can deliver a complex pledge about parenting skills for digital skills and jobs.

According to our pledge, we are going to work in three different areas to deliver:

• supporting and enabling parents as educators in educating their children for a digital future

• supporting the systematisation and recognition of skills marketable in a digital labour environment, acquired via parenting

• help and support to become more active digital citizens themselves.

You can read our pledge and follow how delivery is happening here: https://pledgeviewer.eu/pledge/initiative/647

The Parenting Together project started a series of meetings and training, mostly held in Amsterdam, that mark our work going back to normal. Between 28 June and 1 July, our colleagues from Hungary, Austria, Portugal, Norway, Greece and the Netherlands could again all come together for a super-intensive training after restrictions were lifted on travel for all of them. After months of working a lot remotely, we could again experience how much more effective and less tiring it is to be together in the same room with no masks or social distancing.

In the meeting, we made huge steps forward in developing an online training for parents, establishing the framework for a train the trainer publication, a case management handbook and recommendations for policy. Partners were also offered a course on using the online platform that will host our training from 2022.

A short summary of our training experiences is manifested in this photo