The 2030 Scenarios for Basic Digital Upskilling and Reskilling in Romania

Massive acquiring the basic digital skills for workers is the keystone of successful digital transformation of business and society and not the last of new behaviors that allow a better life for any individual. While its significance is widely acknowledged and politically accepted, the practical implementation remains incipient. This situation heralds the rise of an inevitable skill revolution, designated as a top priority, yet unfolds under the shadow of uncertain job projections. We generate maximum, average, and minimum scenarios for the duration and speed of acquiring basic digital skills at 9 sectors NACE Rev 2 (C, E, F, G, H, I, J, M, and N sectors), in the framework of the Digital Competence Framework for Citizens. The forecasting for the 2030 year is based on the frontiers of the sectors’ historical performances in terms of the Eurostat input data, for different time intervals: the enterprise economic performance during the period 2011–2020 (number of enterprises & persons employed, the growth rate of employment, and the sectors’ average enterprise dimension in terms employees); the enterprise overall basic digital skills performance for the persons aged 16–74 years in 2021 and 2023, as a measure for innovation propensity of the economic sector and the sector capacity to learn measured through the enterprises organized training for ICT skills developed/upgraded for the period 2012–2022. Our main contribution of the paper is to initiate maximal, average, and minimal 2030 forecast scenarios by 9 NACE sectors for digital basic skills acquiring for working individuals in Romania in the conditions of radical innovation in view to reach the Digital Decade target of 80%. The main conclusion of this work is that basic digital skills are a continuous accumulative process, with specific sectoral duration & speed, according to its digital transformative state, which requests a new management paradigm.