A CASE STUDY OF STUDENTS' VIEWS ON THE DIGITAL SKILLS NEEDED FOR THE LABOUR MARKET

Abstract

New digital technologies are changing entrepreneurship. Digital entrepreneurship includes new ways how to find customers for business, how to design new products, how to generate revenue, how to collaborate with platforms and partners and so on. Today's labour market requires staff with foundation digital skills, ICT general skills, ICT specialist skills and ICT complementary skills. Improving digital competences is also a major challenge for the European higher education system. The aim of the study is to determine students' views on what digital skills students need to improve in order to enter the future labour market as well as learn and identify opportunities for students to develop their digital skills. Based on the research on digital competences, a questionnaire was developed for students of the Latvia University of Life Sciences and Technologies (LLU). This reassessment was also compared among the faculties of LLU. According to students, the most important digital skills needed for the labour market are as follows: use and manage information (69.84%), evaluation of information (67.19%) and access to information (65.15%). The comparison among the specialties show that students of agricultural engineering and forest science and forestry engineering programmes have the lowest evaluation of their digital skills, but, of course, the specialty “Information technologies for sustainable development” has the highest. Based on the obtained results, the authors suggest that the study course “Informatics” should be regularly reviewed and updated, the development of digital skills should be promoted in all study courses, as well as the study course “Introduction to the specialty” should be used to reduce the gap between ICT skills for the first-year students.