More than 11 million adults in the UK lack essential digital skills according to the Good Things Foundation.
The UK Government have a useful framework to describe these essential digital skills.
Read about it here.
Does everyone in your organisation have the digital skills they need?
I believe that having the essential digital skills enables people to feel confident when working with different technologies and therefore more likely to be able to deal with changes and upgrades better. I believe that everyone should have these essential digital skills - even if they don't yet work with computers so that one day, when they do need to do something online, they're not too scared to give it a go.
Enabling your people to work digitally sets them up for future success not only within your organisation, but at home too.
The report estimates that 694,000 people will require some form of IT training and with technology changing all the time, it's entirely possible that people who were once comfortable with IT are finding their skills out of date without continuous learning.
How can you help your employees?
There are loads of ways that you can support your employees to learn and develop their digital skills. They don't necessarily all have to go on a course though, there are lots of ways that you can support their learning at work, for example:
Encourage communication through a digital platform like Slack or Yammer
Allow people to bring their own devices to work and use them in the course of their work
Suggest people 'Google' how to do the things they're not sure about (and then share that with colleagues on your digital communication platform)
Encourage those who are more digitally confident to mentor those less so
Use technology for every day things such as booking time off (it's amazing how quickly most people learn how to do this)
Provide plenty of opportunities for everyone to learn all the time
The benefits to the UK economy of supporting digital skills development could be almost £22 billion by 2028
How much economic benefit could such training have on your organisation? Not just the economic benefits, but imagine all the other benefits of having a workforce who are confident enough to work digitally and deal with technological changes as they happen?
