Results from the Roundtable in Hungary

Roundtable meeting description

The 1st Hungarian PIN workshop / roundtable meeting was held at the LÁNCHÍD 19 Design Hotel in Budapest on 24 March 2011 from 10h to 14h. There were 8 presenters and a discussion moderator out of the 29 attendees.

The event focused mainly on the domestic companies and their needs (the demand side), presented by company heads, coming mostly from the SME sector. To focus the presentations, presenters formerly got the questions to answer to.

MATISZ representatives provided general information about the PIN project aims and results so far, the related projects and the e-Jobs Observatory platform collaboration features. This was followed by presentations of various internet professions: Web designer, Animator, e-Commerce, Etical hacker, Webmarketing, Internet Hotline / HelpDesk Operator, Website Usability Expert. After the presentations, moderated consultation session had happened involving all participants. The closing session summarized the lessons learned during the meeting.

The agenda of the PIN workshop and all of its presentations can be viewed at the workshops section of the PIN project page on MATISZ website: www.matisz.hu/kerekasztalok.558.0.html

Main Topics discussed

The aim of the workshop was to determine the needs (knowledge, skills and competences) of the informatics / creative industry towards the professional trainings and to formulate suggestions how to improve these trainings.

Specifically the workshop aimed to find answers to the following questions:

• What kind of is the good labour force, which professional competences should it have?
• How to “produce” a good entrant, what is the result of the school-based course trainings?
• How could we solve the acquirement of practical knowledge through the trainings? Possibly by web presentations, through collaborate processing of caseworks, via 6 Months company field-work and masterwork?
• Would it be important to have “official” acknowledgement of informal knowledge acquired next to working?
• Could a sector-specific talent-development help – various funding, contests, fellowships for youth?

Conclusions

1. Companies participated on the workshop are interested in to get transparent methods on how to determine their needs in the easiest way.
2. It has utmost importance of acquiring usable practical knowledge by outplacement of trainees/apprentices for minimum 6 Months of practice, or continuous (self-)training of the employees next to working, or 1-3 days of collective training construction of employees.
3. Greater emphasis should be taken on the development and measurement of soft-skills during in basic and medium-level trainings.

During our discussions, company heads agreed, that high level of subject-specific knowledge/skills/competences are needed for them to apply a candidate at all (and that they check that via looking through the candidate's portfolio, not by their certificates and papers), but proper soft skills (collaboration, behavioural, teamwork etc.) are needed to keep their candidates inside the company in the long run.