A total of over 660 000 Bulgarian citizens will undergo digital skills training by 2026. This was announced by the Deputy Minister of Labour and Social Policy Natalia Efremova during a round table on “Digital inequality and division of the labor market”, organized by the Bulgarian Industrial Association. More than 500 000 Bulgarians will undergo digital skills trainings, which will be co-financed under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. Approximately 160 thousand people will be included in various measures to increase digital skills under the "Human Resources Development" Programme.

Efremova cites data from the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy, which show that only 30% of the working population in Bulgaria aged 16 to 74 has basic digital skills. About 8% of people have digital skills above medium level. At the same time, approximately 25% of small and medium-sized enterprises have implemented new technologies, while this percentage exceeds 55% in the EU . Only 6% of Bulgarian enterprises use big data, 10% use cloud services and 3% use artificial intelligence.

Against this background, the sector analyzes carried out during the implementation of the BIA project under the Digital Skills Development measure provide valuable information about what specific digital skills are needed for each workplace. Efremova assured that all the tools that have been developed under the projects will be used for the development of the overall policies related to the adaptation of the workforce to the changes in the labor market caused by the digital transformation.

“The sped-up digitization of production processes and the rapid development of artificial intelligence, besides challenges, create many new opportunities for both industry and the employed and unemployed in Bulgaria,” said Tsvetan Spasov, Head of the Managing Authority of the Human Resources Development Programme. According to him, the digital skills development and the digitalisation of processes will contribute not only to improving the workforce quality, but also to increasing the gross domestic product in the long term.