Be Digital is a two-year Baltic-Nordic project focused on strengthening the social media skills necessary for older employees to succeed both at work and in everyday life.
Launched in July, the initiative is supported by the Nordplus Adult Programme. It is being implemented by a consortium of four partner organisations from Lithuania, Iceland, Latvia, and Norway.
The project aims to strengthen the 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 beyond.
There is no doubt that digitalization improves the quality of our lives. However, 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 lag seriously behind, a huge social media skills gap has opened up, especially among older employees who are 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 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. However, 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. Acquiring social media know-how isn’t something that just happens on its own, especially for older employees (50+) who are 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.