Aims & Objectives

The Digital Freelancing project (DiFree) wants to offer  university students and recent graduates, who are interested in the topic, specific training and skill development opportunities, which will be useful in pursuing a freelancing career. It also aims to solicit their self-reflection and  self-skill assessment in view of such a career.

Furthermore, the project wants to offer them advice and coaching before, during, and after they decide to pursue a freelance career, providing training to higher education teachers on the digital labor market, its workforce demands, and essential capabilities, so that this knowledge can reach a larger number of HE students.

The DiFree project aims to fill the gap between the academic knowledge and training offered to HE students and present-day needs of a volatile and rapidly changing job market, where flexibility and digitalization are core competencies.

For this reason, the project Consortium has set a main goal and several specific objectives.

OVERALL GOAL: provide HE students and graduates with digital, entrepreneurial and job-market-relevant knowledge and training useful to pursue self-employment.
Experiential and transdisciplinary learning will be applied by involving outsourcing contractors and companies relying on freelance work.

SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES:

  • explain the world of freelance jobs from a practical and realistic perspective;
  • help HE students and graduates to self-assess their soft skills and competencies before they start a career;
  • provide HE students and graduates with guidance and mentoring before, during, and after their choice of self-employment;
  • provide teachers with practical and relevant knowledge about the digital labor market and digital entrepreneurship, their needs in terms of workforce and required competencies, so that they can disseminate the information among HE students;
  • create innovative, easily accessible and open-source educational material about digital freelance jobs;
  • create a Freelance Hub, a virtual and physical place where the target group can find accurate and reliable information, guidance, mentoring programs, opportunities for life-long training, upskilling and reskilling. It will focus on transversal competencies and soft skills and will supply a place where students and graduates can meet, share knowledge, organize gatherings and events, invite freelancers and freelance job providers, etc.
  • produce an open-source Transferability Manual, describing and commenting on the project outcomes, which will help educational institutions and their teachers introduce digital and entrepreneurial skills in their teaching curriculum.