The GEN Label

The courses developed with support from GEN (seed funding and accreditation via the GEN label) cover a very broad range of digital skills. Some of these have a direct relevance to manufacturing skills, such as IoT & Robotics, although it can be argued that all of the digital skills are likely to be applicable across most sectors of the economy, including manufacturing.

There are hundreds of certified courses with an average duration of eight months but can last up to three years. These are delivered by a range of organisations including private sector training providers, not-for profit organisations and universities. The courses cover 50 digital professions and GEN groups these into seven families:

Development
Network, maintenance and telecoms infrastructure
Cybersecurity and cloud
Data, AI and IoT
Interface, graphics and design
Digital communication, marketing and e-commerce
Management and Strategy

These courses were developed in response to Calls issued by GEN for new digital skills courses specifically designed for their target group of potential learners. As part of their submission (and subsequent assessment) the organisations responding to the call must detail how many people they intend to train, how they will deliver the training, how target learners will be recruited and how they will be supported into employment. Given that the support to be offered extends beyond the actual delivery of training to helping the learners gain employment, there is an incentive to ensure that there is a real need for the skills being developed.

All training courses offered have a GEN label which means they have been through an accreditation process and this provides value to learners. There are a variety of levels of certification available via a wide range of providers. Some of the GEN labelled courses can result in a Diploma (at Associate, Bachelor’s or Master’s level) recognised by the French State. Some universities (e.g. the School of Engineering at the University of Marseille) offer GEN labelled courses that result in a diploma from the university.

Courses are delivered by a variety of training partners. Half of training courses are exclusively face-to-face, 3% are exclusively online and the remainder have mixed learning including face-to-face and online. All GEN labelled courses are specifically designed to provide learning methodologies that are suitable for the target trainees.

GEN Label key figures :

13 months of training on average
40 665 learners since 2016
64% of positive outcomes after the training

In 2022, these training programmes included:

are A-level (or beneath)

of learners are women

of the learners come from priority urban areas or rural areas

The call for innovative projects

In 2021, GEN set up the first edition of its call for innovative projects with the aim of encouraging the emergence of innovative projects. By the end of 2022, 70 projects had been selected and €2.4m have been granted.

Key figures of the call for projects :

40 projects completed by 2022
14,511 beneficiaries :
38% are women
21% come from priority urban areas
22% come from rural areas
62% are A-level (or beneath)
87% satisfaction rate

GEN's MOOC

A MOOC is provided by the University of Lille and the Grande Ecole du Numérique to offer training organisations tools and ideas to help them implement the most appropriate educational approaches.

We also co-created a MOOC with Social Builder for training organizations to share best practices to attract and retain more women in digital training. Indeed, women are under-represented in the digital sector: they represent 30% of employees in this sector, all professions combined, and the figures are not improving. The goal of the GEN is to train at least 30% of women in its accredited courses, and for that we work on breaking down stereotypes: