Digital professions: a sense and an appetite – Recommendations to guide digital training courses

While the digital ecosystem has the greatest demand for skilled workers for its professions, the education and training institutions that provide knowledge and attract talent are often seen as mere components of the education and training sector responsible for supplying it, when in fact they are actors in this digital ecosystem in their own right.

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One of the consequences of this situation is often a lack of synchronisation between training courses and the real needs of companies using or implementing digital technologies. In addition, the loss of profiles, particularly women’s profiles, in scientific subjects leads us to question the existence of a link between teaching that focuses mainly on technical knowledge and the recruitment difficulties observed in this sector.

Cigref has therefore set up a special working group to look at how training courses meet the needs of companies in the digital ecosystem.

In order to do this, the working group conducted a survey of 278 employees to find out:

• Their educational background, whether digital or not, and their current position.
• What they had learned from their training and put into practice in their current role.
• The lessons that were not on the programme but would have been very useful in their role.

Based on an analysis of the responses to this survey, 10 recommendations can be made:

1. Communicate more effectively about digital careers at all ages;
2. Promote re-skilling of women in digital careers;
3. Strongly support the promotion of these professions from the earliest age;
4. Encourage as far as possible continuing training courses for both men and women. And to increase women’s interest in the second half of their careers, consider the need to formalise and promote courses of study exclusively for women;
5. Highlighting the richness and uniqueness of each of the major digital professions rather than repeating articles on the excellence of this or that technology;
6. Convincing recruiters to change their approach by making employers more aware of the value of those with 2/3 years after French Baccalaureate;
7. Provide students with more effective tools on « legal » and « relational » issues;
8. Generalise training in project management and in the need to take account of the ‘systems’ approach to information systems;
9. Design and build materials and tools that are better suited to guidance staff;
10. Systematically integrate a digital dimension into all training courses in non-digital sectors to produce better equipped professionals, but also to facilitate possible future retraining in the digital sector.