European Commission has announced a pilot project on digital internships. The beneficiaries will be the graduate students from autumn 2018. The announce comes within the celebration of the 30th year anniversary of the Erasmus EU programme. 

According to Roberto Viola, Director General DG Connect, and Martine Reicherts, Director General DG EAC, Erasmus and Erasmus+ programmes give new experiences to the students and boost their CVs. Furthermore, digital skills are part of achieving these kind of programmes because there is "a radical digital transformation of our society and economy, which requires pooling efforts to quickly adjust and seize new opportunities".

European Commission is planning to, on the one hand, "develop a self-assessment tool on digital capacity for schools and higher education institutions in the EU". In this way, they will be able to "develop and improve their effective use of technologies for digital age learning". On the other hand, regarding higher education, European Commission will help "higher education institutions, staff and students implement digital learning strategies through a digital readiness model, which will also enable them to make full use of the state-of-the-art technology, including learning analytics".

To support digital skills through internships, there is a Horizon 2020-funded Digital opportunity pilot project, announced in the Digital Single market mid-term review. "The €10 million scheme will give students of all disciplines hands-on experience in fields such as cybersecurity, big data, quantum or artificial intelligence, that are highly demanded by companies and organisations", explain from the European Commission. They have also highlighted that students who participate will receive an average grant of 500€ per month for an internship of four to five months. This pilot project will run from 2018 to 2020 and it is expected to support 5.000-6.000 students. 

It is remarkable that one of the three main objectives of the Donegal Digital action plan is to build strong Donegal digital communities.

Read the complete article via European Commission's Digital Single Market.