History of the European Computer Driving Licence - History of Computing: Learning from the Past - page 142

At the time of the development of ECDL it was believed by the task force that com-
puters were used by some 50% of the workforce. Thus, as an order of magnitude, it
was not unreasonable to assume that some 60 million European workers should be
competent at least at a basic IT-user level, in order to utilise the investments in infor-
mation technology and systems. It was a fact that most of these millions of users had
become IT-users over very few years and that most of the users had received little or
no IT-training in their schooling or education before they entered the work force. At
this time, the European workforce probably faced the largest retraining and adult
education challenge ever. ECDL addressed exactly this challenge by defining a basic
skill level and by offering mechanisms to entice users, employers and organizations to
raise the skill level of the individuals in the work force. It was acknowledged that
these needs could not be met in the very short term.
5.4 Today
ECDL has grown worldwide with 9.7 million candidates and 121 active countries by
November 2009. This growth is shown in Figure 1 below.
Fig. 1. Timeline and history of ECDL 1
6 Organisation
The ECDL Foundation was set up in Ireland as a Company limited by guarantee,
having no share capital. Following legal advice this model was selected as being the
1 http://www.ecdl.org/publisher/index.jsp?p=94&n=170