DEVOPS COMPETENCES FOR SMART CITIES (SMART-DEVOPS)

 Smart-DevOps project addresses the shortage of digital and transferrable skills in the municipalities’ smart cities sector and will support this sector’s employees in their professional development. Results are expected to benefit smart cities and municipalities which aim to adopt the DevOps culture, principles and practices by introducing DevOps professional profiles.

It is a Sector Skills Alliance where universities, VET providers, companies and national standardisation bodies come together to define and develop the skills needed in an emerging and very dynamic sector: Smart Cities.

It will address those working on Smart City strategies and tools, i.e. ICT and technical staff in municipalities, and will apply the DevOps approach to their work.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a compound of “development” and “operations”, and in software development it is methodology that combines the development phase (Dev) and the operations phase to shorten the development life cycle of a software product.

It is an agile and iterative approach where development and operations specialists work closely together since the beginning to continuously develop, deliver, test and improve the product.

What is a Smart City and who is behind it?

There are many definitions of what a Smart City is, but we propose the following:

“A smart city uses digital technology to connect, protect, and enhance the lives of citizens.”

Development and operation specialists that are behind the development of Smart Cities are:

• Technical staff
• Managers
• Support staff
  With this project, we would like to propose a methodology for implementing the DevOps approach in Smart Cities.

The project will:

1. Map skills needs of smart cities Development and Operations professionals (ICT project managers, coders, technical writers, web-designers, system administrators, technicians, etc.) working in municipal ICT departments.
2. Design and deliver a VET curricula combining digital and transferrable skills, including a MOOC, open educational resources (OERs), e-learning, face-to-face training and work-based experience.
3. Pilot the developed curricula in Cyprus, Germany, Greece, and Italy and valuate the experience.
4. Disseminate and exploit the project results beyond the partnership.

 Some key features:

• The project will strengthen the collaboration between VET (vocational education and training) providers, municipalities and smart cities IT vendors.
• eCF (European e-Competence Framework) will be used to describe the profiles
• a mapping exercise to ESCO-ISCO08 will be done (European and International Standard Classifications of Occupations)
• EQAVET (the European Quality Assurance in Vocational Education and Training) will be used to ensure quality of training provision
• the project will relate to EQF / NQF (European and national qualifications frameworks) and ECVET (European credit system for vocational education and training) to facilitate mobility and recognition.