Digital skills – How Can I Develop Them?

Years ago, it was considered that the essential skills for human development had to be knowing how to read and write. However, with the passage of time and the advent of technologies, digital skills have positioned themselves as tools that are as necessary as becoming literate. For this reason, it is essential to know what they are, what they are for, and how to develop each of these competencies.

What Are Digital Skills?

According to the definition by the European Commission, digital competencies are: “the set of knowledge, skills, attitudes, strategies, and awareness of the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and digital media. These skills are necessary to carry out tasks, solve problems, manage information, create and share content and at the same time, generate knowledge effectively, efficiently, and adequately, whether for work, leisure, learning, consumption, or socialization.

This means that digital skills are more extensively used than are regularly used in ICT. Another could be to go through a critical, safe, and creative job to obtain objectives related to work, employability, learning, free time, inclusion, and participation in the group.

Therefore, these skills also require using a specific language, behavior patterns, or programming. Likewise, the control of computer applications, access to secure information sources, and knowledge of each person’s rights and freedoms in the digital world.

The Importance of Digital Skills

It is no secret to anyone that technology is advancing at a rapid pace today. Due to this, in order not to be left behind in the obsolete and retrograde areas of ​​specialization that you are developing, it is necessary that you go hand in hand with advances and even more so in the area of ​​technology.

Therefore, most of the decisions and activities that we carry out daily are linked to technology, which leads us to reflect on what digital skills need to be developed according to our area of ​​expertise.

For this reason, you can get the answer to the importance of digital skills, since regardless of your profession, it will be the environment that will guide you to develop information management skills.

In this way, we do it to keep up with the news or communicate with our family and friends far away, thus demonstrating that digital tools have become a fundamental part of our daily lives.

Types of Digital Skills

As we mentioned, no matter what profession you’re in, developing some basic digital skills is crucial, which will provide you with functional digital capabilities for efficient and quality work. Some of these are: 

Digital Communication

Ability to communicate, have relationships, and cooperate efficiently with tools and digital environments. As a result, a professional who has digital communication competence can:

• Communicate using digital tools efficiently, both synchronously and asynchronously.
• Actively participate in online conversations and debates by giving relevant contributions.
• Communicate efficiently and synchronously online.

 Therefore, it contributes to the company:

• Generates market and consumer understanding.
• Increases internal efficiency and productivity.
• Promotes brand positioning and work.

Information Management

Ability to search, obtain, evaluate, accommodate and share information in digital environments. Therefore, the professional with competence in information management is capable of:

• Browse the Internet for valuable information, resources, and services.
• Make efficient searches on the Internet that allow you to obtain necessary information.
• Obtain information in real-time and anywhere.
• Subscribe to relevant content and monitor the network for crucial details.

 Due to this brings us to the company:

• It brings trade wisdom and competitive study.
• Facilitates innovation.

Digital Knowledge

Ability to perform professionally and personally in the digital economy. As a consequence of this, the professional with the competence of digital understanding is capable of:

• Effectively use digital media and tools.
• Understand the hypertextuality and multimodality of the new digital media.

 Therefore, it contributes to the company:

• Increase productivity and accelerate innovation.
• It changes the way of managing ingenuity and processes.

Networking

Ability to work, cooperate and collaborate in digital fields. Therefore, a professional who has networking skills is capable of:

• Work on processes and goals shared with digital media.
• Produce collaborative documents online.
• Communicate, using digital media, effectively and profitably with your work team.

 For this reason, it contributes to the company:

• Optimization of the circulation of information and understanding among company workers.
• Improves the efficiency of processes.
• Promotes creativity and innovation.

How To Develop And Deepen Your Skills

As we have mentioned throughout the article, it is essential that you take charge of creating your digital skills regardless of the profession you develop. For this reason, we are in a completely digitized world; therefore, developing these tools will benefit us. Using the latest technologies will boost you when looking for a new job.  

Finally, after explaining some of the digital skills, you will ask yourself, how can we acquire these new digital skills? The answer to this is quite simple, and it is about maintaining constant training always to guarantee one step ahead. For this reason, we leave you some platforms that can help you train continuously. 

• AICAD Business School
• Google Activate
• edX
• MIT OpenCourseWare
• SENTENCE