Aims
- To empower adults and mainly women to be integrated into the economy either as employees or entrepreneurs based on their needs and abilities.
- To provide high quality learning opportunities for adults so that they enhance their digital and financial competences while acquiring new key competences such as entrepreneurial skills in an attempt to safeguard social inclusion, access and participation in the labour market and society
- To support adults to set up their own ‘home-based business model’ or ‘work remotely as employees’
- To facilitate access to upskilling pathways programme by designing a skills identification and screening tool, providing a learning programme adapted to the learning needs of the target group, and validating these skills acquired through non-formal learning
Background
The expanding use of digital technologies such as smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers for work at home and elsewhere is rapidly transforming the traditional model of work. It can improve work-life balance, reduce commuting time, and boost productivity.
Research (EUROSTAT 2017) has shown that there is a stable increasing of adults working from home. More specifically, the percentage of employed persons aged 15 to 64 in the EU who usually work from home stood at 5.0% in 2017. In the EU, more self-employed persons usually worked from home (18.1%) than employees (2.8%). The frequency of working from home increases with age which indicates the necessity of adults and seniors to remain in the skill force. Only 1.6% of 15- 24-year-old in the EU usually worked from home in 2017, rising to 4.7% of 25-49-year-old and 6.4% of 50-64-year-old.
Further to the above, research has shown that a slightly higher proportion of women in the EU usually worked from home (5.3%) than men (4.7%). Work is a determining factor of gender equality and women’s economic independence, but also important for the entire economy. Women’s employment patterns are tightly connected to motherhood. Similarly, another category of adults which favours working from home is the group of adults with disabilities. Over 15 % of employed people with disabilities worked from home in 2011, compared to 13 % of those with no disability irrespective of which of the two definitions of disability is used.
