The EDSA project has been featured in the European Data Market study 2021-2023. The latest European Data Market study demonstrates that the demand for data professionals is expected to grow with 8.7% in the next 5 years, while in 2019 there were an estimated six million data professionals in the EU27. However, still as a result of a shortage of skills, digital transformation initiatives in Europe are often delayed by 8.1 months on average, and for every second company, the skills gap has had a substantial impact on both revenue creation and the ability to deliver products and services to the market.

The European Data Science Academy (EDSA) has been a Horizon 2020 EU project that ran between February 2015 and January 2018. The objective of the EDSA project was to deliver the learning tools that are crucially needed to close the skills gap in Data Science in the EU. The project was looking to bridge the European Data Science skills gap by developing multimodal open courseware tailored to the real needs of data practitioners. The latest European Data Market presents the EDSA approach and results, featuring also the main business benefits derived from this project, as well as the main challenges addressed.