News Story

FORGE Runs an EU Commission Future Internet and Digital Skills Workshop

John Domingue, Friday 2 Oct 2015

At the request of the EU Commission FORGE, an EU project coordinated by KMi, ran a workshop at the headquarters of the Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE) unit in Brussels on Digital Skills and the Future Internet. The workshop was attended by senior FIRE representatives including the unit’s Head and Deputy Head as well as representatives from the eSkills unit in Luxembourg by video link.

In addition to presentations from members of the FORGE project there were presentations from the European Research and Education network GEANT and Cisco.

The key theme of the event was that there is a growing digital skills gap which deeply affects European industry. For example, one recent study estimates that the UK is losing 2 billion pounds per year due to unfilled roles which require digital skills. Piotr Pluta Director of Corporate Affairs at Cisco Systems stressed the importance of digital skills within their corporate vision of the Internet of Everything (people, things, processes and data) which will soon be the foundation of a 19 trillion dollar market.

KMi’s FORGE team (John Domingue, Alex Mikroyannidis and Aitor Gomez-Goiri) and Andrew Smith of MCT are liaising with Piotr and other senior Cisco managers to see how our FORGE results can meet their significant training requirements. One specific technology is PT Anywhere which embeds Cisco’s powerful internet simulator within eBooks. The event was chaired by John Domingue.