This study investigates the impact of various educational and social factors on the digital skills of vocational education and training (VET) students, emphasizing the significance of continuous skill development in the digital age. Utilizing structural equation modeling (SEM), the paper analyzes data from 382 adult VET students in Greece, examining the effects of Erasmus program participation, daily computer use, educational platforms, and social network engagement on digital competencies. The findings reveal that participation in Erasmus programs and the use of educational platforms significantly enhance students’ digital skills, highlighting the value of international experiences and digital learning tools in VET. Conversely, daily computer use alone does not significantly impact digital skills, suggesting that structured and purposeful digital tool integration is essential for skill development. The study also underscores the positive role of social networks in improving content management skills, advocating for their strategic use in educational settings. These results demonstrate the need for targeted digital literacy initiatives within VET programs to prepare students for modern labor market demands. The research contributes to the theoretical understanding of digital skill acquisition and offers practical insights for educators and policymakers to enhance VET curricula, fostering economic and social progress through improved digital literacy.

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic led to the need to move educational processes to virtual environments and increase the use of digital tools for different teaching uses. This led to a change in the habits of using information and communication technologies (ICT), especially in higher education. This work analyzes the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the frequency of use of different ICT tools in a sample of 950 Latin American university professors while focusing on the area of knowledge of the participating professors. To this end, a validated questionnaire has been used, the responses of which have been statistically analyzed. As a result, it has been proven that participants give high ratings to ICT but show insufficient digital competences for its use. The use of ICT tools has increased in all areas after the pandemic but in a diverse way. Differences have been identified in the areas of knowledge regarding the use of ICT for different uses before the pandemic. In this sense, the results suggest that Humanities professors are the ones who least use ICT for didactic purposes. On the other hand, after the pandemic, the use of ICT for communication purposes has been homogenized among the different knowledge areas.

Use of technologies and online presence is now almost inevitable in language learning. The practice of virtual exchanges (VEs) has been receiving a lot of attention among educators at all levels over the past years. This research paper sheds light on 13 VEs carried out in pre-service teacher education in the last six years and proposes its own VE design based on recommendations from the literature with the future perspective of designing a specific VE for the research. The aim of the systematic review was at first to determine the exchange and interaction set-ups and the potential gains in the terms of pre-service teachers’ skills development. Afterwards, we identified areas for improvement and proposed our design of a VE between pre-service teachers of English in Slovakia and Turkey. Some of the expected contributions of the proposed VE design are development of a linguistic and intercultural communicative competence, digital literacy, and other competences relevant for development of VEs.