Remote Work Capacity Building - Empowering Digital Transformation for Physically Disabled People
Key resources in the process of digital transformation in any industry and any area are people. People with no disabilities (physical, mental, intellectual) regularly take part in the contemporary labor market (both online and traditional) and participate and contribute to digital transformation, whilst those with some form of disability are in most cases excluded. Some evidence suggests that approximately 15% of the world's population have some form of disability. It is estimated that in Kuwait, around 45,000 people are facing some form of disability, whilst this number in Serbia is around 730,000 people. Only 13% of those people are employed in Serbia and in the case of Kuwait no such data is available.
With more than 5.2 billion users worldwide the Internet represents a huge virtual labor market with immense offering of remote work opportunities. The expansion of the remote work platforms such as Freelancer, Upwork, Toptal etc, and the tendency of modern businesses to outsource a part of their activities to “remote workers”, create huge potential for finding employment in different areas. This fact represents a huge opportunity for people with disabilities, especially for those with physical disabilities, to enter the virtual labor market and find a proper “remote” employment.
This project focuses on building a digital learning platform for people with physical disabilities focused on building the capacity for remote work in the area of digital marketing. The reason why digital marketing was selected as a competence area is the expertise of the project team and the fact that remote platforms offer many opportunities for people with relevant knowledge in this area. In the first phase of the project, the existing levels of general digital and digital marketing competences of the disabled people participating in research will be examined using relevant methodology, Also, the offering of the remote work platforms will be carefully examined. The gap analysis will provide better insights on the critical areas for improvements and based on those insights the professional digital marketing courses will be prepared and hosted on a selected distance learning platform.
Besides a distance learning platform with professional courses for digital marketing as tangible output of this project, the project will result in building and broadening the scientific knowledge in the area of digital (marketing) competences of the people with physical disabilities.
This project represents a collaboration of researchers from Australian University, College of Business in Kuwait and Institute of Economic Sciences, Digital Economy Department in Serbia, and is funded by Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement in Sciences (KFAS) under the project No. CN22-19TM-1618.
