Digital skills potential assessment design

Digital Potential and leadership skills

Welcome to Mosaic‘s feature on assessing Digital skills Potential.

Digital Skills potential assessment

Welcome to our digital skills training feature.

How should leaders prepare for hybrid work?
What is best practice when setting up teams for hybrid success?

What is Digital Intelligence (DI)

Certainly, digital intelligence is more important than ever. Digital intelligence describes the combination of social and cognitive skills that will allow a person to face different challenges impacting both their personal and/or professional lives.

  • The mere knowledge of using smart devices cannot be any more termed as being digitally knowledgeable.
  • A person should be fully confident and comfortable when using a smartphone or computer.
  • Only then, the individual can be termed as digitally knowledgeable.
  • In the future, digital knowledge will be one of the most important determining factors for judging the technological capability of a person.
  • With willingness and determination, an individual can effectively build a knack for liking digital platforms.

However, it is never too late. In the current times, a lot of bad things are going on the internet that might affect kids and even adults and a popular one among them is cyberbullying.

One can protect themselves from such threats with effective digital knowledge about the device or the platform that they are using.

Steps to attain digital intelligence

Digital citizenship

This factor deals with using the technology and the different media platforms safely. For kids who fall under the minor category should be using digital devices under the supervision of an elderly person.

 digital creativity

An individual who is willing to be digitally creative will focus on creating new content and invest time in the ideas that they have to turn into reality. All these can be done through the usage of different digital tools.

Digital Skills – digital potential

digital entrepreneurship

A person should be using the different digital skills to solve different technological problems on a global level.

Digital Potential

Accelerating the speed of change and emphasizing what technological advancements it can offer is every organization’s goal. It doesn’t look as though the shift toward digital transformation is slowing down any time soon – and the recent disruption has merely accelerated it.

The challenge for HR leaders is how to enable and support workers to embrace the digital change and manage the digital transformation. How can HR leaders identify those who feel comfortable with such change both in the current employee pool and the wider applicant pool?

Even before the current disruption, many organizations were questioning whether they had the internal capabilities to manage the change needed. Fifty-nine per cent of HR leaders responding to our global Digital Readiness Survey in 2020 said that their organizations did not have the defined set of skills needed for their digital transformation. Nor had they the processes in place to assess the digital readiness of their own people.

In this same research, we discovered that homegrown talent is currently not being sufficiently used or developed. Just 15% of organizations said that identifying and developing their internal talent was part of their digital strategy. Of course, this figure varies widely by sector but only 7% of the public sector, non-profit and education organizations have made internal talent development a priority.

Digital Readiness

84% of employers are set to rapidly digitalize working processes, including a significant expansion of remote working. Indeed, there is a potential to move 44% of their workforce to remote work.

This change has significant implications for talent management strategy, which needs to evolve in order to:

  • Accommodate the need for a new type of leader.
  • Identify new digitally-ready skills, competencies and behaviours in employees – and plan how to develop these.
  • Redesign organizations’ job architectures.
  • Refocus on employee communications and engagement.
  • Create a sense of community and connection to support employee well-being and resilience.

To embrace and feel comfortable with this change requires those across the workforce to hold a digitally-ready or future-ready approach. Such an outlook and set of behaviours impact how they approach new tasks, roles and develop and also how they manage change, persevere and collaborate virtually.

What is Digital Readiness?

Digital readiness is an individual’s ability and enthusiasm to navigate new ways of working. It is about embracing constant change, adapting to ever-developing technologies and leveraging the advantages they offer. What is it not – and this is important to state – is how skilled a person is at specific tasks.

Digital Skills Training

These encompass all those problem-solving skills needed to work competently with digital technology. Digital literacy skills are particularly important for recent graduates.

Having to adjust suddenly to remote working means that, at a time when meetings are inherently more difficult, we find ourselves needing to hold more of them.

While the rules are somewhat more relaxed if the video call is social rather than professional in nature:

Digital Skills – digital potential

  • It’s hard to tell on a video call if someone is looking at you, someone else or just absent-mindedly browsing his or her inbox.
  • Any cross-talk soon renders conversation impossible. To avoid this, the simplest thing to do is to use a system of hand-raising; some video apps have a function to do this digitally, or you can just raise a finger to the camera.
  • Setting a clear agenda for the call, which is always good meeting etiquette, is even more important.
  • Someone, however informally, as the call leader whose job it is to make sure everyone has a chance to speak. You could start, for example, by taking turns to update one another on what you have been doing before allowing the conversation to flow more freely.
  • One important point of etiquette around video calls is the mute button: Use it frequently, and use it wisely. In a larger call of, say, more than five people, you should always mute your microphone when not actually speaking to prevent the discussion from being overwhelmed by a cacophony of background noise. Just remember to click the button again before you next speak, or else endure the shame of that now well-worn chant: “You’re on mute!”

Digital Skills graduate employers value most

  • Resilience
  • Persistence
  • Influence
  • Ability to Learn
  • Communication Skills

Digital Intelligence Quotient

Digital Intelligence Quotient (DQ) can be further deconstructed into eight key areas: Digital identity, Digital rights, Digital literacy, Digital use, Digital communication, Digital safety, Digital emotional intelligence, and Digital security.

In total, 24 digital competencies (KSA’s and values).

THE Digitally Intelligent Leader

  • Firstly, the Digitally Intelligent Leader shows that they care for their employees’ well-being. This will necessitate flexibility in order to be an attractive employer..
  • Come up with strategies and think about how you can extend your workspaces to be part of those strategies.
  • Having the right tools in places, such as video conferencing and project management platforms, will be key in making hybrid arrangements work.
  • Leaders also need to be cognizant of their individual team members’ preferences and able to deliver what they need to support them.
  • Be sensitive to an employee’s needs. Otherwise, you risk losing employees to companies that do.
  • Only then review across your team, how much hybrid working flexibility you can offer based on each employee’s specific role.

The DfE’s adult training focuses on improving digital literacy skills for Working remotely; and Online jobs…since more people will be working remotely for the rest of 2020. And beyond.

Intelligence Types

A few of the prominent ones include

  • Spearman’s theory – Two-factor theory of intelligence. A generalised intelligence (g-factor) & specialised forms of intelligence (s-factor).
  • Sternberg’s theory – Triarchic theory of intelligence. Referring to the ability to Assess, Create or have ‘Street Smarts’.
  • Gardner’s theory – Theory of Multiple Intelligence.

Digital Skills – digital potential

Basic Digital Skills

In fact, almost 12 million people in the UK need to learn the basic digital skills. For life online – as well as for work. So the most valuable digital skills are sought after for all kinds of jobs.

  • 82% of all job vacancies require digital skills
  • Roles requiring digital skills pay 29% more than those that don’t
  • In recent years, the number of digital jobs grew almost three times as quickly as other occupations

Free online eLearning courses

We start with three of the Government’s initiatives. Then list all of the Open University’s free learning courses. followed by our own YouTube self-improvement channel, and personality-related quizzes.

 

The increasing importance of digital skills training

The world of work is changing continuously, rapidly integrating the use of new technologies in jobs. Most employers require all job seekers to apply online. Frontline service workers in many industry sectors now rely on automation and digital tools in their work. Jobs require employees to know how to use email, search the internet, create documents, and handle other digital literacy tasks, such as managing benefits online. Many jobs have become inaccessible to adults who lack digital literacy skills.

Building digital literacy skills, and being able to prove these skills to employers, can improve job-seeking succes.

War for Digital skills Talent

Digital skills are needed to balance the competing demands of financial success with social and environmental responsibilities.

Companies must now be more agile and collaborative to manage the global/local divide; their leaders will need to be flexible, internationally mobile and culturally sensitive.

Strong conceptual and strategic thinking capabilities in order to manage risk and cope with the dangers and uncertainties associated with globalisation.

-As the world population grows and ages, demographic imbalances are emerging, leading to skills shortages in some areas and increasing migration.

-For organisations, fewer people means the war for talent will continue to rage; leaders will need to attract, motivate and retain increasingly diverse teams and find ways to develop and promote the growing numbers of international migrants, women and older people into leadership positions.

  • Digital Skills for Leaders

-Technology will continue to blur the boundaries between private and work lives, will broaden generational divides, and will shift power to employees with extensive digital skills – particularly the rising class of “knowledge workers,” who can work anywhere.

–As organisations become increasingly virtual, leaders must recognise and harness the critical skills of digital natives, foster collaboration between them and traditional workers, and encourage high levels of openness, integrity and sincerity to build a reputation in a more transparent world.

Our digital skills potential designs

We are assessment specialists in both work and education settings. For more insights into meaningful assessments contact Rob Williams Assessment for a comprehensive appraisal.