Digital skills have implications as much for social inclusion and cohesion as for innovation and productivity. With many services, public and private alike, shifting online entirely as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, online transactions have become the norm for the digitally skilled segment of the population, leaving thereby those lacking basic digital literacy digitally excluded from a wide range of social, economic, and political activities. Every country is in urgent need of an educational system fit for the digitally-driven age, alongside supplementary programs, to train and retrain the demographic that has long left their studies behind. It is a two-sided challenge that involves both basic digital skills needed for individuals to stay integrated and served, and specialized skills required for companies to stay relevant and competitive.
Now more than ever, digital skills have become integral not only to livelihood, but also to prosperity, and with this comes the need for a skill revolution. According to the Future of Education for Digital Skills report by EIT Digital Report, the two main gaps in the issues of primary and specialized digital skills, considering the supply of broadly defined education and training provided by both public and private institutions, are as follows::
- Primary and secondary-level educational systems’ approaches toward teaching digital competencies are glaringly fragmented;
- Educational institutions for specialized digital skills, especially universities, are generally slow to change their curricula, and, when they do, their approaches remain highly conventional and unresponsive to the changing demands of the labor market;
- There is a lack of private-sector supply targeting other demographics than the lower end of very underprivileged ones with short-crash courses that give them the bare minimum set of skills to get by in their daily lives.
- The offerings of tech giants and other specialized private-sector establishments tend to focus more narrowly on their own labor market needs and be exclusive, as attendees need to cover their costs or get funding.
To shift toward the more favorable scenario, referred to in the report as “Digital Plenitude” where public-sector offerings are responsive to technological trends and market needs while private-sector offerings are expansive in scope, topic, and target of their training, three main changes must be made:
- The entire public education systems — from primary schools to universities — need to urgently modernize its largely outdated digital education programs to better adapt to emerging technologies and changing labor market needs. To achieve this, organizational and governance reforms are needed to open the systems to partnerships with civil societies as well as to tangible investments in connectivity and new training for both professors and teachers;
- The scattered private-sector digital education initiatives need to shift to a more mutually complementary, broader, and better coordinated overall offering of digital skill initiatives. To achieve this, NGOs’ offerings should expand their training’s scopes, topics, and targets to include the middle level in the scale of digital skills, while tech giants and other private players should provide courses that are not just strictly instrumental to their technological ecosystems, as well as partner with local governments and public institutions to offer scholarships or other financial schemes that would broaden the pool of participants to their education offerings.
- National digital skill initiatives, networks, and ecosystems need to be better orchestrated to establish a fair and inclusive digital skill educational system across the country that involves both public and private education providers. To achieve this, there must be collaboration at the national level spearheaded by the governments, given the huge challenges and costs involved; Emerging trends of education initiatives need to be coordinated, further strengthened, and extended to include the private sector.
