What is digital competence?

As a Student at Hyper Islands Digital business program I’m surrounded by people that will define the next step in the digital era. Every week we produce mind-blowing ideas, concepts and real functioning services that could easily become the next Spotify. But we are a micro percentage of the work force.

We laugh about companies and professionals that have no understanding about the digital. We point out and joke about the companies that don’t have a responsive website or just launched an awful looking app. Or maybe it is that we don’t feel sorry about industries that are going through complete disruption (read: Taxi, Finance, Hotels).

But being able to tell what’s a good User Interface or not doesn't make me or anybody else digitally competent. That would be over-simplifying a broad and complex concept.

So what does the research tell us?

In my research the greatest explanation of digital competence comes from the paper Online Consultation on Experts’ Views of Digital Competence ” (pg. 16, 2012). It explains that digital competence comes in 12 areas and describes a digital competent person;

1. Possess general knowledge & functional skills
2. Demonstrate and use it in everyday life
3. Develop specialized and advanced competences for work & creative expression
4. Is proficient in technology mediated communication and collaboration
5. Applies information filtering and management
6. Manages privacy & security
7. Respects legal & ethical aspects
8. Has a balanced attitude towards technology
9. Understands & are aware about the role of ICT in society
10. Able to find and learn digital technologies
11. Makes informed decisions on appropriate digital technologies
12. Seamless use and self-efficiency

This is a broad but great collection of areas within digital competence. But what does this mean and how can someone learn all this?

After enough research I was able to compile digital competence into four different levels.

1. The Digital illiterate

The first level is the no-level. This is a person that is not up to date with current technology and uses less effective methods than what’s easily available. It’s not a question about the cost or time but the needs and the wants of that particular individual. They exist in every company, family and organisation. Of course age is a factor but because of the high tempo in digital someone can quickly become illiterate if they don’t keep up.

Digital illiteracy is also timeless. Being irresponsible today could be potentially career destroying in a few years. Example; Who thought 8 years ago that those party pictures from your last trip to Bali would be reviewed by your next employer? Or that a Tweet could cost you your career over the time of a flight?

Internet is timeless and therefore your actions will be reviewed by the standards of tomorrow.

2. The Digital outsider

The second level is all about people using digital services as apps, streaming and online services to improve and simplify their life. These individuals use technology and manages to use it in a good way. But the experience is not always frictionless and often requires help with more advanced tasks. As an example they have a smartphone and uses it to go online to check the news and the weather. But they are also sceptical to more advance apps that requires effort, logins, payment information and so on.

Remote collaboration and being in a constant high-paced digital environment is hard and problematic. For example it is hard for the digital outsider to use and manage multi-services communication. This is when you use different technologies as FB messenger, snapchat, Instagram, text, Videochat to communicate on a personal context and using Slack, E-mail, Trello, Salesforce, CRM, two different business dashboards and an intranet at work. This technology overload makes the digital outsider to back down and devolve to digital illiteracy instead — But more on than in a later post.

3. The Digital team player

The third level is a highly digital competent person that is able to quickly adapt to current technologies and use them to improve themselves, their teams and company. For a digital team player a Skype meeting gets as effective as a regular meeting and now they strive to not even have the meeting in the first place. Collaboration goes fast and they set up and understand business data, which they use to make informed decisions. Technology is no longer an obstacle for delivering great communication and emotions.

Digital team players are keen to try out new technology and tries to help digital outsiders to become a team player. They are centered on how to be more effective with the same resources and actively learns new things online. A typical trait for a digital team player would be using home delivery services for grocery shopping e.t.c.

4. The Digital innovator

The forth level are the disruptors of our time. They are the individuals that uses technology to work for them and are able to do one week of work in 4 hours. A digital innovator uses digital services, data science and programming to innovate new solution that not improves a little but the doubles it and so on. These are rare breed and they have no limits on what they can create in the right environment.

A trait for a digital innovator is proficiency in a large set of softwares and digital skills as well as great communication skills with all digital levels. Learning new skills is on auto-pilot and they always want to improve whatever and whenever.

For companies there is real value for understanding it’s digital composition between these levels. If you have 60 % digital outsiders you may not want to switch to some cool new digital service anytime soon.

The next post will be about why digital transformation is a big question for HR-department and how knowing your digital composition is key for success.