Digital skills: Establishing a digital learning pathway

Digital skills: Establishing a digital learning pathway

There is a growing mismatch in the demand and supply of digital skills in the UK, which will be accentuated by the economic fallout of COVID-19.  Already, there are 2.9 million people unemployed in the UK and this number is likely to rise as the Government’s Job Retention Scheme winds down and the longer-term impacts of the economic lockdown surface. To put Britain back to work Government will need a flexible range of options that support different parts of the population with differing skills and experience, able to support a range of approaches from governance oversight to activist intervention. Whilst early indicators suggest that some sectors may experience a ‘V’ shaped recovery others will likely shrink in size on a more permanent basis necessitating career and sector switching. 

techUK and Deloitte propose a solution that will help individuals identify effective digital learning pathways, thereby delivering a more effective training outcome. The UK Government is uniquely positioned to create a skills platform between citizens interested in entering the digital workforce, the training material and available roles. The need is for a solution that not only supports retraining of the technically savvy but is also able to map out a tailored learning journey for those wishing to enter the market but who may need significantly more support and guidance.

The Government has the credibility, profile and network to catalyse the creation of a trusted solution positioned at the centre of the digital skills ecosystem.  It is able to take a strategic view, invest over an extended period, and create and maintain a gold standard for assessing human capabilities based upon the consolidation of existing frameworks, trusted by all parties in the digital marketplace.

Government stepped into this space with the creation of the Department for Education’s Skills Toolkit signposting individuals to high quality resources available online in digital and numeracy skills. The appetite for this type of signposting intervention was evidenced by the volume of uptake with hundreds of thousands of interactions in the first month alone.

As this paper demonstrates, the creation of a platform tailored to the individual – backed by Government, would deliver enormous benefits for employers and individuals alike. Individual learners would feel more confident in investing their time and energy in reskilling on a tailored pathway laid down by a platform backed by the Government. Employers meanwhile would benefit not only from a larger pool to recruit from but an ability to easily identify individuals with the skills (both human and technical) they are looking for from cohorts passing through the platform. Government’s involvement in building and maintaining such a platform would also allow it to leverage a significant quantity of data to develop an analytical understanding of the future digital skills pipeline enabling Government to better target interventions moving forward.  

techUK does not propose this platform to be a holistic solution to the work Government will have to undertake to get the nation back to work post-COVID. However, we believe this solution is appropriate for a specific demographic who are motivated to learn and looking to reskill but not comfortable navigating the digital landscape.

techUK members already offer a plethora of online and in-person training, from basic digital skills right through to courses on the latest technological developments. We need to find a way to bring these initiatives together and increase the confidence people have investing their time in upskilling opportunities.