Training Smart Cities Professionals on Digital and Horizontal Skills in the Industry 5.0 Era

This paper presents the SMACITE training program, developed as the primary output of a 3-year Erasmus+ project aimed at addressing the skills gap in the smart cities sector by reskilling and upskilling both current and prospective professionals. The training program features a dual-format educational approach that includes a MOOC for asynchronous learning on Smart Cities enabling technologies and a Virtual Worlds platform for synchronous teaching of horizontal skills. The training program is based on a multidisciplinary curriculum that promotes personalized learning pathways through the MOOC by integrating a diagnostic tool that aims to identify prior knowledge and skills of learners and propose specific courses or modules of a course to attend. Piloted between February and October 2024, the training program attracted 330 participants from Greece, Italy, Bulgaria, and Spain, comprising university students, vocational trainees, and professionals from both the private and public sectors. The feedback collected about the courses from the participants was high, ranging on average -at a scale from 1 to 5- between 3.99 and 4.44 for the courses addressing Smart Cities Engineers and between 3.71 and 4.42 for the courses addressing Smart Cities Technicians.