Digital footprint – manage your online presence as the first step to digital networking

By 2030, Finland will have 170 000 workers less than it has today. This means that Finland will need 20 000 immigrants a year to fill the shortage.

Skilled and qualified staff are especially needed in the fields of trade, administration, technology, and data processing, as well as telecommunications. Those jobs are going unfilled, making the provision of advanced digital skills part of a solution to unemployment.

As UNESCO has underlined, digital skills have moved from ‘optional’ to ‘critical’ and need to be complemented with transversal ‘soft skills’, such as the ability to communicate effectively in both online and offline media.

Being able to establish a digital presence and connect with potential employers or customers has been linked to a higher earning potential. Experts have predicted a growing number of jobs for people with advanced digital skills: therefore, we are facing an urgency to support job seekers or newly graduated students to acquire digital networking competencies.

What are digital skills?

Digital skills are broadly defined as those needed to “use digital devices, communication applications, and networks to access and manage information”, again by UNESCO.

International Working Women of Finland Association (shortly IWWOF) is one of the partners of DigiMESH. Since its beginning in 2019, the goal of the organization is to strengthen the status and integration of unemployed or underutilized international, highly educated women into their employment in the Finnish society, and the labour market.

IWWOF operates as a digital network that lowers the threshold to employ international skills, highlights the international potential of the Finnish labour market, and supports the development of the skills of international experts so that they can integrate into Finnish working life and society. During the pandemic, all networking activities were digital: the gap in digital skills has been one of the highest thresholds to tackle for the association. Establishing a positive digital presence has been a key for participants in the IWWOF activities for receiving support as international job seekers.

For this reason, IWWOF Vice-Chair, Lucia Vuillermin, has created a short digital footprint guide where an overview of the online recruitment statistic and some guidelines on how to reduce the impact of their digital footprint for jobseekers. Not only the conscious ones, known as active digital footprints, but even unconscious ones, called passive digital footprints.

Get to know more about how you can improve your digital presence and ability to networking by downloading the guide! Download it via this link.

 

References:

• https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/columns/columns/mp-talk/18200-finland-needs-foreign-workers.html
• https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/finland-worlds-happiest-country-seeks-migrants-2469486/amp/1
• https://en.unesco.org/news/digital-skills-critical-jobs-and-social-inclusion
• https://yle.fi/news/3-12082626

 

Writer: Lucia Vuillermin, Project Manager & Vice Chair, International Working Women of Finland ry

Photos: Lucia Vuillermin