The State Public Employment Service of Spain (SEPE), the State Foundation for Training in Employment (Fundae) and several large technology companies signed agreements in autumn 2019 to create an important package of training resources in digital skills, publicly available completely free of charge. The companies included Amazon, Cisco, Cloudera, everis, Accenture Foundation, Telefónica Foundation, Google, Huawei, IBM, LPI-Linux Professional Institute, Oracle, and SAP.

Currently, many of the country's large companies have free training resources in digital skills on their web pages, as part of their corporate social responsibility programmes. All those who signed are aware of the usefulness of making these courses accessible to all workers, as a way to improve their employability.

Employed and unemployed workers, freelancers and SMEs will have free access through Fundae’s and SEPE’s corporate websites to a great array of courses, with different levels, languages, and durations. They will cover themes such as cybersecurity, the internet of things, programming languages and methodologies, digital marketing, electronic commerce, and cloud computing.

These agreements, enabled by the action framework agreed between SEPE and Fundae, open a collaboration space to respond to social and business demands and tackle the requirements of rapid technological transformation.

New technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, programming, data management outside physical spaces, mobile applications and online commerce, will cause the emergence of jobs non-existent today or the transformation of many current ones. They will also help change people’s professional competences, to improve their employability and to adapt their skills to the new requirements. According to the Centre for Analysis and Economic Development Internet (Adei), around 3.2 million jobs related to digitisation will be created in Spain by 2030; another 600 000, with a high human component, will be less likely to be replaced by machines.

The tech company agreements are the result of the commitment of the Ministry of Labour, Migrations and Social Security to contribute to the development of a new productive model. Supporting training throughout working life is critical to the adaptation and improvement in competitiveness of companies and of employed and unemployed workers in a globalised world in permanent process of transformation. The initiative is in line with work undertaken under the 2019-21 Action plan for youth employment which includes specific goals to offer training for core skills to unemployed young people and digital skills at basic and higher levels.

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