Digital agency and the skills gap

The concluding report from Deloitte Centre for the Edge and Geelong Grammar Schools‘ collaboration looking into digital skills in the workplace, Digital agency and the skills gap,¹Evans-Greenwood, P & Patston, T 2019, Digital agency and the skills gap, Deloitte, Australia, https://www2.deloitte.com/au/en/pages/public-sector/articles/to-code-or-not-to-code-coding-competence.html. has been published by Deloitte, Australia. This report pulls together the results from across the project to provide an overview of the journey and the findings.

There’s a huge amount of angst in the community that our education system cannot keep up with rapid technological change, however this project shows that this is likely not the case. What we’re seeing is, in many cases, not a lack of skills, but an inability to navigate an increasingly complex digital environment. While digital skills are important, knowing when and why to use these skills is more important, particularly in a world where new knowledge is no further away than a search engine accessed via a smart phone.

Workers are unable to make the connection between the skills they have and the problem infant of them, making this a problem of unknown knowns. It’s not that workers lack skills, what they lack is discernment, the ability to read the digital environment around them and make sharp judgements about when and why particular digital tools and skills should be used. A lack of discernment limits a worker’s digital agency, their ability to act freely in a digital environment.

Solving this problem is not simply a question of teaching students and workers more, and more relevant digital skills. We need to focus on fostering in them the discernment required for them to develop the work habits that will enable them to make the most of digital technology.

The project was a long and fascinating journey so this concluding report itself is quite long, around 12,000 words. A much shorter business-friendly summary, The digital ready worker,²Evans-Greenwood, P, Patston, T, & Flouch, A 2019, ‘The digital-ready worker: Digital agency and the pursuit of productivity’, Deloitte Insights, https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/focus/technology-and-the-future-of-work/learned-helplessness-workforce.html. was published last week by Deloitte Insights. A lot of valuable insights were dropped on the cutting room floor to create that summary, hence this report.

This report provides a summary of project’s journey, from the initial provocation through the roundtables, the more recent workshops, to the development of the project’s conclusions, as well as providing a detailed exploration of the findings. If you’re an educator (K12 or post-secondary) you might find this longer report more valuable as it digs into the details of the models presented, and does a better job of exploring the implications of the findings. If you were involved in any of the projects, the this report will join a number of dots and provide that ah-ha moment.

Revisiting the concept of learned helplessness, the report shows how the solution to learned helplessness is not to teach students more digital skills, but to foster their digital agency, their capacity to act independently and make their own free choices in the digital workplace. The concept of digital natives is explored in light of what the project discovered, resulting in a new model of digital competence in the workplace the identifies four archetypes: the digital naïf, digital pragmatist, digital explorer, and digital evangelist.

Finally, the report develops a progression capturing how one’s digital agency changes over time, and explores how digital agency might be fostered in both students and workers, and the changes this implies.