Creative further education initiatives abound, but when will they become the mainstream of the education system?

Digital Assembly in Sofia, Bulgaria, on Tuesday, day 2. In the morning, inspiring descriptions of the opportunities of IT in healthcare, a grilling by Roberto Viola, the European Commission's Director-General for Digital Affairs, and the signing of agreements on CAM Corridors, an investment in connected and/or autonomous vehicles where these can freely cross borders, thereby testing cross-border road safety, data access and data quality.

In the afternoon, as one of several parallel tracks, it is time for me to be part of one of two panels dealing with the topic Digital skills for labor market inclusion: reskilling of the labor force and jobs for young people. My mission for the day is to make the case that the "education system" - higher education institutions, vocational colleges, adult education, etc. - must be able to offer natural pathways for working adults, just as there are natural pathways for those who have completed upper secondary school.

In the first panel, two ladies introduce themselves who are well worth watching - feel free to watch the video recording from the 29th minute onwards. The first is Rosanna Kurrer, founder of CyberWayFinder, a company that works with IT security companies to offer three-year specialized training courses for mid-career professionals who want to retrain as IT security experts. The training has two distinctive features. The first is that it exclusively recruits women, on the grounds that the gender balance among IT security professionals is extremely skewed, even by IT industry standards - in Europe only 2% are women. The second is that there are no technical prerequisites. It's all about soft skills and learning-by-doing in collaboration with companies. And companies are very happy.

The second (from the 36th minute) is Susan McCambridge, who heads up one of the operations of Belfast Met, a state-funded further education college in Northern Ireland. McCambridge is responsible for "emerging technologies training courses", where she works very closely with tech companies to provide tailor-made courses, where several thousand people - both with and without previous technical backgrounds - have gained specialist IT skills. In this case, too, it is largely about soft skills of learning-by-doing.

In the second panel - "my" panel - chaired by Cecilia Bonefeldt-Dahl, Secretary General of Digital Europe, I started the conversation (around 1.15.00) by putting forward the thesis that all the good examples of further education initiatives not only need to be scaled up - they need to be made natural main tracks. I was joined on the panel by Lie Junius, Public Policy Manager at Google in Brussels. She summarized the experience of Google's training initiatives (approx. 1.23.00) with the following five success factors:

• Close partnerships between educators, stakeholder organizations and businesses.
• Tailored design, even when training is scaled up.
• The importance of long-term soft skills such as safety awareness, business acumen, creativity and teamwork.
• Gender awareness.
• Neutrality in relation to different technological platforms ("be platform agnostic").

The message of my closing remarks (around 1.55.00) was that these Google five success factors, as well as the experiences of CyberWayFinder and Belfast Met, should be obvious ingredients in all higher education.