Foundational Digital Skills for Career Progress

This brief synthesizes research on digital skills and supplements the research through interviews with organizations teaching digital skills to people who lack them. The researchers seek to inform programs offering job training and employment assistance of the importance of foundational digital skills and awareness that many people lack these skills. The brief recommends the adoption of foundational digital skills training and provides a better understanding of the strategies and challenges involved in establishing programs that teach job seekers and workers foundational digital literacy.

The increasingly technological nature of jobs means that digital skills are necessary for workers to thrive in the modern workplace and will become even more essential in time. Research shows that many workers and job seekers lack foundational digital skills. Closing this gap requires digital training, especially for adult learners and workers displaced from occupations.

(This brief is 17 pages long).

Helpful strategies emerging from this study to assist organizations in teaching foundational digital skills include the following:

1. Providers should not overlook the need for foundational digital skills in job seeking and employment.
2. Explicit assessment of digital skill level can be helpful to understand needs, including discerning between basic task completion and higher-level cognitive problem solving with technology.
3. Integrating basic foundational digital skills training into existing workforce development programs can be a useful way to meet job seeker and worker needs.
4. Online training should address digital skill needs to ensure participants can successfully navigate courses.
5. Access to digital tools (computers and the internet) plays a key role in people becoming digitally literate and should be accounted for in training programs.

• Last Updated:
• Created:
• Resource Publication Date: 2019
• Author(s): Loprest, P.; Hecker, I.
• Funding Source: JP Morgan Chase
• Resource Availability: Publicly available
• Posted by: Justin Venneri
• Posted in: Workforce System Strategies