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Attracting young people to ICT during Get Online Week
28th March 2014
Helping young people turn interests into skills and skills into jobs
This week is Get Online Week across Europe which is all about digital empowerment and boosting confidence and skills, so more people can make the most of being online. To find out how Virgin Media is supporting Get Online Week, we caught up with Annalise Tyrie who is Corporate Responsibility (CR) Manager in the CR team at Liberty Global, our parent company.
As part of Liberty Global’s ‘Promoting a Digital Society’ corporate responsibility focus area we have been promoting Get Online Week. The theme this year is ‘employment and digital jobs’. During the week telecentres (libraries, NGOs and educational centres) across 30 countries have been reaching out to over 500,000 Europeans. Liberty Global has been marking the week by raising awareness with of unfilled ICT jobs and by supporting the launch of YouRock a new platform for young people.
The European Commission’s Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs has recently estimated that Europe could soon face a shortage of an estimated 900,000 information and communications and technology workers by 2020. To demonstrate our commitment to the Grand Coalition, Liberty Global recently announced at its support for two innovative projects:
Firstly, Liberty Global will join Coderdojo, an open source, global movement of free coding clubs for young people, as the first pan-European corporate donor, supporting over 60 new CoderDojos across Europe and reaching an additional 2,000 young people in 2014.
Secondly, Liberty has become a key sponsor of YouRock, an employability platform for young people which encourages them to use their online creation activities to demonstrate their skills to employers. Liberty Global’s support will help YouRock to reach 200,000 young people across 11 European countries in 2014.
We want to enable the next generation to use technology not only as an intrinsic part of their lives, but also as a great opportunity for career development. For more information, please check out our website at www.libertyglobal.com/cr.