BE DIGITAL project

Be Digital is a two-year Baltic-Nordic project focused on strengthening social media skills necessary for older employees to succeed both at work and in everyday life.

What is our aim?

The project aims to strengthen social media skills of citizens over 50 in Nordic and Baltic countries in order to improve their position in the labour market, increase their competitiveness and extend their productive working time until retirement and longer.

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Why social media training is important?

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There is no doubt that digitalization improves quality of our lives. But at the same time, the speed of digitization brings new challenges. With economies, societies and governments across the globe increasingly going digital while formal training and education programs lagging seriously behind, a huge social media skills gap has opened up, especially among older employees – not social media natives.

Social networks have drawn over 2.5 billion people worldwide with businesses racing after them. At the same time, the nature of the social media use in the workplace is fundamentally changing as well: it is no longer a discrete thing that people do in certain jobs, and more an integral component of work itself. But this approach only works if employees are skilled and ready to use their skills. In this respect the real problem is that people are usually expected to know these skills without any training. While acquiring social media know-how isn’t something that just happens on its own, especially for older employees (50+) – not social media natives. The challenge is how to teach them social media in such a mercurial environment. Therefore, with this project we will work towards overcoming this challenge by creating a training programme for the development of social media competences in the workplace.

Main implementation steps

•Creating the project website;
•Performing a comparative analysis of the main trends in the social media use in the workplace across the Nordic and Baltic countries;
•Developing a 15-hour training programme offering citizens over 50 a foundation of social media skills necessary to succeed both at work and in everyday life;
•Forming the groups of learners in partner countries, 10-15 persons per country;
•Implementing a piloting training for the formed groups of learners in partner countries for testing the developed initial version of the training programme and collecting the learners’ feedback on it;
•Organising a mid-term international workshop for learners in Riga, LV to reflect on the skills and experiences gained during the trainings on local level;
•Organising Live Web conference – the final training event involving all trainers and learners from all partner countries to present and discuss with their international colleagues the projects created and assignments completed during the training;
•Developing the final version of the training programme based on the feedback received from piloting participants;
•Running international exploitation workshop in June 2021 in Vilnius, LT for presenting and promoting the project results to the project target groups as well as key stakeholders with the aim to achieve their greater engagement and ensure the sustainability of the project results.