Blog
Essential Digital Skills Toolkit - Launch Day!
It’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for! It’s been a busy couple of months behind the scenes at SCVO Digital and we are delighted to (finally!) be able to announce the launch of Scotland’s Essential Digital Skills Toolkit.
In consultation with over 60 different organisations we’ve developed the Toolkit in order to support individuals, groups and organisations to measure their digital skills.
The Toolkit can be used by individuals and organisations running digital skills projects in their communities and workplaces, and can help to identify:
- a skills gap
- to benchmark against other organisations
- to evidence a need
- and to measure the success of an intervention.
The Essential Digital Skills Framework, launched in May 2018 after extensive consultation, and now hosted by the Department for Education, includes life and work skills and is made up of five sections: communicating, transacting, problem solving, handling information and content, being safe and legal online.
In July, we were joined by charity and public sector colleagues working in digital inclusion at a co-production event in Edinburgh. Attendees generously gave their extensive and varied experience and knowledge to develop the toolkit.
Sheena Greco, Principal Educator, NHS Education for Scotland said: “I enjoyed contributing to the development of the toolkit at the Essential Digital Skills event in July - a great example of collaborative working! I had the opportunity to contribute both on the day and afterwards, providing advice around making the toolkit as accessible as possible.”
On the day, there was a lot of discussion around the measurement scale we chose to use in the Essential Digital Skills questionnaire. As you will see, we have limited the responses to three options for each section, instead of offering a more granular scale. We have chosen this as we believe this will improve the accuracy when reporting the results but would encourage organisations to modify this if they are measuring smaller increments of progress.
We also recognise that some of the statements within the sections of the checklist might not be relevant/give enough information for some, so therefore we have included a bank of additional questions and suggest you add these in to each section but keep the core ones as well.
This Toolkit was created with real people in mind and we have tried to make it as user-friendly and accessible as we can. We encourage you to use it, to modify it and come back to use with your feedback and suggestions.