DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION AND HIGHER EDUCATION IN COLOMBIA: NEW SKILLS FOR NEW OPPORTUNITIES

This paper explores the challenge for digital transformation in Colombia, with the aim of evaluating HEI’s initiatives and their effectiveness in educating youth with adequate skills, able to satisfy the emerging needs of the labour market and to boost innovation within companies. We explored the offer of university courses and programs aimed at developing different levels of digital competencies in the Colombian context, thanks to a data collection carried out with the web scraping technique. Results highlight great efforts in the country to align digital content learning with the needs of businesses and organizations. There is a rich offer in courses, adequately related to the different levels of digital literacy, but costs remain high, fueling the gap between social strata. Furthermore, the contents offered are often repetitive. Training strategies shared between different institutions could reduce costs in pursuing common digital education objectives and avoid a proliferation of much too similar courses. The originality of this work lies in the unified perspective regarding the analysis of the Colombian offer in digital training, which allows to highlight costs and overlapping of contents, suggesting network strategies, currently absent or weak, to create new shared paths of educational development.