Digital skills are life skills

More and more things in life and work demand digital skills. Shopping, applying for jobs, searching for information, finding your way anywhere, managing emails and chat messages, watching TV. Everyone needs digital skills to participate in modern life.

And yet digital skills are not growing at the rate they need to. The number of young people in the UK taking IT subjects at GCSE has fallen by 40% since 2015. Globally, and more so in least developed countries, women are disproportionately disadvantaged with men being 52% more likely to be online than women. Inequality affects life skills as much as it affects everything else.

How might we use the idea of digital skills as life skills? Learn more, teach others. From reminding relatives not to click on links in text messages to volunteering to share your digital skills with a charity or small business, to encouraging your employer to set up a digital volunteering programme, anything and everything we do to improve the digital skills of others improves their life skills and opportunities.