As SMARCO works toward a stronger European skills ecosystem for secure, resilient, and sustainable smart communities, one question is central: Are today’s learning offers truly preparing people for the competence needs emerging towards forthcoming years?
In this context, SMARCO focuses on preparing Europe’s workforce and stakeholders for the next generation of secure, resilient, and sustainable smart communities. Through a foresight approach, it looks ahead to emerging needs and translates them into clear competence priorities, helping cities and regions understand what skills will be required to design, govern, and operate resilient smart-community solutions that deliver real public value.
SCALe, an Erasmus+ Capacity Building in Higher Education project in ASEAN, builds a micro-courses ecosystem designed to upskill and reskill learners for smart and sustainable city contexts. Through focused, modular learning units, it supports professionals and stakeholders in developing practical knowledge across digital transformation, governance, and sustainability, helping them respond to rapidly evolving city challenges. Through flexible learning pathways, SCALe builds “hybrid” competences that combine technical understanding with policy awareness and sustainability thinking. Its approach supports lifelong learning and helps bridge the gap between emerging technologies and their effective application in real urban environments.
A recent skills-comparison report explores this by mapping the SCALe micro-courses ecosystem against SMARCO’s foresight skill signals. The purpose is straightforward and practical: identify where training is already aligned, where important capabilities are under-emphasised, and how “future skills” are being framed differently across initiatives.
What the comparison confirms: strong alignment on developing trust networks and green priorities
The report finds strong convergence in areas that will remain essential for smart-community transformation:
- Trust and governance, including digital governance, policy and regulation, ethics, cybersecurity, and data protection.
- Green transition and resilience, including climate action, energy systems, and resilience-oriented management.
This reinforces SMARCO’s direction: the future workforce needs hybrid competences that connect technology, governance, and sustainability, rather than treating them separately.
The report also highlights capability areas that SMARCO treats as increasingly decisive for real-world implementation, social legitimacy, and measurable public value, but which are often less explicit in current course mappings:
- Citizen participation and co-creation, moving from general awareness to practical methods such as facilitation, deliberation tools, and participatory evaluation.
- Well-being, inclusion, and accessibility, operationalising equity-by-design through accessibility checks, inclusion metrics, and inclusive evaluation practices.
- Circular economy, embedding circular procurement, lifecycle-oriented service design, reuse and recovery systems, and circularity KPIs.
- Innovation to implementation, strengthening delivery mechanics such as commissioning and procurement pathways, partnership and vendor governance, and adoption and scaling strategies.
A key conclusion, the big shift is that skills are increasingly judged by outcomes: how communities deliver solutions that are trusted, scalable, and socially fair, rather than by technology labels alone. SMARCO’s foresight frames these as broader capability clusters such as governance, inclusion, circularity, and impact, and the report suggests making those competences more explicit and assessable in training offers.
Reference: Damasiotis, V., Fitsilis, P., Tsoutsa, V., & Kyriatzis, V. (2025). Bridging skills for smart and sustainable cities: Comparing SCALe course outcomes with SMARCO foresight priorities (Report). University of Thessaly. Retrieved February 5, 2026, from ResearchGate
