In the modern workplace, digital skills are highly valued;...
The digital age is expanding into all areas of our lives, and it is not just those who work in IT that will need to be alert to this change.
What Exactly Are Digital Skills?
When considering the digital skills gap, this question is not asked often enough.
Cornell University defines digital literacy as ‘the ability to find, evaluate, utilize, share, and create content using information technologies and the Internet’.
By this definition, digital skills are any skills related to being digitally literate. Anything from the ability to find out your high-score on Minesweeper to coding a website counts as a digital skill.
What Digital Skills Are Needed For the Modern Workplace?
Knowing how to answer your emails, to access a company’s files on Google Drive, or to tweak a website’s code are all digital skills that are increasingly sought after in today’s job market.
However, in the modern workplace, it is increasingly impossible to point out which digital skills you may or may not need. There is no hard and fast rule about which jobs you will need to Excel for and which jobs you will not. Digital literacy is a language; the more digital skills you have, the better you can speak it.
To the uninitiated, learning digital skills can make a person feel like they are entering a new country full of new customs. Digital skills come with their own set of sub-skills after all.
Which Jobs Require Digital Skills?
The job search website Indeed has listed HTML5, MongoDB, iOS, Android and Mobile App as the fastest growing keywords found in online posts for jobs.
Coding is a job related to all of these keywords, and it is evidently an industry that is booming, but it is not the only job that requires digital skills. Marketing, customer service, retail, managing, writing and selling are all jobs associated with these keywords and all of those jobs could well require digital skills.
In short, it's safe to assume that almost all jobs will require some level of digital skills. Even if they do not, it's wise for jobseekers to insure themselves against the rising need for digital skills in the workplace.