My journey with DC4WORK-project

From the beginning of 2019 I’ve had a change to participate to Erasmus+ -project called DC4WORK. That means Learning at Work in a Digital Age – Promoting Digital Competences for Employability and Innovation.

I’m a student at Häme University of Applied Sciencies and I’m studing to be a vocational teacher, specialized in digital teaching methods. As a part of my studies I contributed to a pedagogical development work and luckily I found DC4WORK project for this purpose. I’ve a long experience working in IT projects and also in international environment, but working in educational project was totally new to me.

So, I was very excited to be able to be part of this initiative. Many business services in small- and medium-size enterprises, especially in retail and tourism, are getting digitized very quickly. People in these branches have sometimes hard time keeping up with the change.

DC4WORK wants to help them by promoting work-based learning and open training material for everybody’s use. There’s a lot of learning material in DC4WORK Online Toolbox 4.0. The Toolbox  includes videos, minilectures and questionnaires, for instance. By learning these you can improve your digital competence in your own pace. You can study material on your own, or as a team, at your workplace.

The highlight of this project for me was the Training Week here in Hämeenlinna. Project participants arrived from Germany, Austria, Portugal and Belgium to spend some beautiful spring days with us in Finland.

The HAMK Team, Essi Ryymin, Katja Maetoloa and Anne-Maria Korhonen, had planned an ambitious schedule for the week. We had several workshops on how people learn at work, how to motivate people to update their competencies in technological disruption and how the world of work is transforming. All important subjects.

In those couple of days I learned that even we come from different countries, we are very similar. We all want to promote employment, good life and well-being – and one important key to get there is continuous education, and that’s what DC4WORK is about.

So, it has been very inspiring experience for me to participate to this Erasmus+ -collaboration and to co-operate with talented European educators, who are passionate about their work. DC4WORK project will continue, and I’ll definitely keep up following its progress.