9. Introducing digital education to all phases of life Digitisation changes the way we work. Jobs and entire professional profiles will disappear. New qualifications and combinations of qualifications and, correspondingly, new training content will be necessary. Already in 2014, no less than 509,000 data experts were being sought in Europe. Analysts estimate that, 3.5 million data experts will be needed by 2020. This demonstrates, for one thing, that we must step up our qualification programmes. For another thing, digitisation is opening up a significant amount of job opportunities. New digital work will be more demanding and more complex. In the ICT sector alone, there are currently 40,000 open positions. In the future, more and better training and skill development will be key, in the opinion of employees. Tasks involving mostly routine activities will not be needed as much as at present. Flexibility and knowledge of methods for using digital technologies will become more important. This can already be seen in training courses where several specialised courses are combined into newer, more general training. Currently, training in flexography is part of the professional qualification for digital and print media designers. Digital education will increasingly become a prerequisite for a successful working life and is also a requirement for our self-determination and general evaluation capabilities in the digital world – not only on the job, but also as consumers and citizens. These demands are accompanied by new possibilities: new teaching and knowledge distribution methods, along with interactive learning methods are providing expanded access to knowledge. However, even though nearly all schools in Germany have Internet access, they are slow in using new media and forms of learning, such as utilisation of tablets. www.de.digital 49