Digital Skills Office

The focus of the Digital Skills Offensive is to increase basic digital skills. To achieve this the Digital überall (“Digital everywhere”) initiative was created, which offers free workshops for digital beginners that are organised by various adult education providers all over Austria.

A total of 4,500 free "Digital überall" workshops are organised to support people with digitisation. These are held on the topics of digital education for senior citizens, dealings with public authorities in a digital way, security on the internet, living with increasing digitisation and artificial intelligence.

Here you can find the workshops offered by Digital überall and book workshops directly with the adult education providers (online or by telephone). New workshops will be added on an ongoing basis.

Since the end of June municipalities have also been able to book up to 3 free workshops. The process is simple and unbureaucratic: after selecting a "Digital überall" workshop the municipality submits a booking request to the adult education provider via the booking platform. A date is then agreed upon. All the municipality has to do is provide a suitable venue and take care of the communication with the participants.

Another task of the office is to develop a National Reference Framework for Digital Skills including the development of a handbook for educational organisations to reference their curricula and course offers to the DigComp competence model.

The national reference framework, based on the DigComp 2.3 AT model, will act as a tool to describe and compare digital skills and qualifications. With its implementation digital skills of different target groups can be visualised and their gaps be identified. Formal educational offers will be referenced to enable an overview of education and training offers in the area of digital skills and to make digital skills measurable and comparable. 

The office has taken over the coordination and management of a new expert platform into which the existing taskforce (led by the BMF and fit4internet) has been integrated. The members of the expert platform are leading experts in the areas of education, adult education, science and research, business and public administration and various interest groups.

The meetings cover topics such as:

• Digital skills model for Austria
• Initiation and implementation of projects, e.g. National Reference Framework for Digital Competence
• Contribution of expertise to projects

The digital skills campaign focuses on increasing basic digital skills. As an immediate measure the pilot project "Digital Skills for All" was initiated, and planned, implemented and evaluated by the Digital Skills Office in 2023.

From October to December 2023 the "Digital Skills for All" initiative carried out around 800 free workshops for digital beginners all over Austria. More than 8,500 participants were reached with the free workshops.

A total of 36 education providers carried out workshops in 209 Austrian municipalities on the topics of digital education for senior citizens, e-government and (safe) use of digital media for parents and teenagers.

You can download the evaluation report here.

In the course of the pilot project "Digital Skills for All" quality guidelines for basic digital skills courses were created.

Download the quality guidelines here.

From May to December 2023 Austria took part in the pilot project European Digital Skills Certificate (EDSC), in which the Digital Skills Office acted as the national coordination partner. Finland, France, Romania and Spain were also among the five pilot countries in addition to Austria.

The project focussed on the national consolidation of the feasibility of a European certificate for digital skills. A final report was written by the office and submitted to the European Commission.