Partnerships in E-commerce sharing activities and learning Erasmus Project

Project Title

Partnerships in E-commerce sharing activities and learning

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for vocational education and training

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: International cooperation, international relations, development cooperation; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Transport and mobility

Project Summary

The last 15 years have shown a great increase in eCommerce, and nowadays eCommerce is really big business. Actually, the Chinese eCommerce company “Alibaba” is the world’s largest retailer and the eCom-merce business is still growing rapidly (growth rates of 15% or more in many countries). The new forms of trade are emerging because technology is developing at breakneck speed. All together this has brought about a multitude of new possibilities and at the same time a need for new skills among the workers in the online shops (web shops). The association FDIH (the Danish industry association for eCommerce companies) have made an extensive survey among its members. The results of the survey show that 41% of the companies lack skills in their actual workforce.19% of the survey participants have given up hiring quali-fied staff. FDIH conclude, that there is a high demand for basic trade skills. First and foremost, it is a great wish (83%), that employees are skilled in marketing and marketing optimization. 35% of them want
skills within customer service. Both these areas are usually covered within the existing curricula, so we need to challenge the existing teaching material and the online shops.

Ecommerce Europe has made a survey in 2016 showing that online merchants with cross-border ambitions are often held back by barriers such as legal uncertainty due to unclear or very different rules, taxation and payment systems that differ greatly, or high prices of delivery due to a lack of transparency in the market. Other difficult barriers to overcome when selling abroad are related to (online) payments, competition issues, language, client relationships and marketing. From an educational point of view, we need to learn more about how to educate the future workforce in the eCommerce industry.

Through this project 20 eCommerce teachers from six different VET institutions in five different EU countries exchanged their knowledge and good practices in eCommerce teaching, and they visited in total 21 web-shops in the five participating countries. Through this they learned a lot about eCommerce issues taught in the other countries, as well as they were provided with the latest up to date knowledge and the educational needs from the companies. The teachers were taught by each other through job shadowing and through extensive meetings with the web-shop companies and each other.
Furthermore 49 VET students participated in the project, doing 14-days LTTA. They stayed at the hosting school for a couple of days and the rest of the period they were hosted by a web-shop. At the web shop they stayed in pairs and solved a specific company case for the web-shop and at the same time taking part in everyday life in the web shop. Because of this the students had a heightened opportunity to learn from the web shop companies directly through internships. Finally, the students had a good opportunity to widen their own network and global mindset. It was the primary objective of the PEAL project to provide the partnership schools with knowledge and inspiration through the exchange of good practices and discussions with each other and with the web-shops involved. We expect every partner has already made changes in their eCom-merce teaching material, when the project finished. Furthermore, we now have a virtual community filled up with good ideas and lessons learnt. The management of the partnership schools indeed benefited from the project. They are now able to ensure, that their education is up to date and at the same time according to rules and regulations of their respective country.

Whenever a team of teachers and students were back home, there was a meeting with the participants, the PEAL project manager and the management. The outcome was discussed at the next project meeting. Throughout the lifetime of the project there were six project meetings – one at each institution. Each meeting was either for planning and preparation of the next mobilities or for sharing experiences between all project partners, and to make (preliminary) conclusions. We were convinced we had made a strong and reliable project consortium with a good methodology for carrying out the project activities as well as managing the finances and quality. All partner schools were all very experienced in international activities, including LTTA projects. All partners have a good relationship with the labor market and the companies in their area. Be-cause of these experiences and circumstances, we truly believed it would not be a real problem for us to find good web-shops to be part of the PEAL project, and we addressed this as one of the first issues, when the project started. The potential long-term benefits for the VET schools is the possibility of continuously providing the eCommerce industry with a workforce, which is very well equipped to handle the rapidly changing challenges in the web shop business.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 138610 Eur

Project Coordinator

Tradium & Country: DK

Project Partners

• BRIDGWATER AND TAUNTON COLLEGE
• STICHTING REGIONAAL OPLEIDINGENCENTRUM ZUID-HOLLAND ZUID
• ROC Noorderpoort
• Stucom SA
• Siauliu profesinio rengimo centras