High-Tech Skills Industry Report

Submitted by Alina Danieles… on 02 July 2019

In the framework of the Skills Agenda for Europe innitiative, the European Commission (DG GROW) with the support of its Executive Agency for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (EASME), launched an initiative to develop an integrated Digital Capability Reference Framework for enterprises to strengthen capabilities to digitally transform businesses.

The initiative ran between January 2017 and January 2019, coordinated by Capgemini Consulting in partnership with IDC and empirica.  As a publication of the service contract the partners have prepared the report High-Tech Skills Industry - Increasing EU’s talent pool and promoting the highest quality standards in support of digital transformation, on behalf of the European Commission, Directorate General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs..        

The report presents an overview of the state-of-the-art, testimonies, best practices and proposals for a digital organisational reference framework taking into account the existing e-Competence Framework, and aims at showing how enterprises, especially SMEs, could increase their digital capability and how an appropriate combination of ability, competences, methods, tools and technologies can be achieved.           

Revealing the huge impact triggered by the shortage of digital talent, the report discusses the widening talent gap in digital skills that is hampering the digital transformation programs of organisation and results in competitive advantage losses. As a support for organisations in their digital transformation journey and an instrument to defining digital talent strategies, the ‘digital capability reference framework’ has the  purpose of establishing a connection between capabilities of the organisation and competences of the employees.

As such the model of the Digital Capability Reference Framework was built on four pillars:

  • Capabilities (connected to the IT Capability Maturity Framework IT-CMF), seeking to answering the question "which capability do we need to invest in to improve business performance?"
  • Competences (based on the European e-Competence Framework - eCF): Which competences are relevant for developing a capability?
  • Roles (based on the European IT Professional Role Profiles): Who in the organisation is carrying out a role associated with those competences?/Is the employee involved matching the requirements for that role?/upskilling, recruiting or outsourcing
  • Methods: Which IT organisational and management frameworks provide the competences, knowledge and skills related to the required area / Which methods/ tools can support our employees?         

With diverse case studies on implementing these instruments, the report also offers examples of how the Digital Capability Reference Framework would work in practice.

For a thourough reading please see the brochure attached.

© -2019– European Union. All rights reserved 

The information and views set out in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of the Executive Agency for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (EASME) or of the Commission. Neither EASME, nor the Commission can guarantee the accuracy of the data included in this report. Neither EASME, nor the Commission or any person acting on their behalf may be held responsible for the use which may be made of the information contained therein.

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High Tech Skills Industry brochure.pdf 1.39 MB