As we emerge out of the pandemic, it is clear that the use of digital has become even more important in the home and the workplace.
During the last eighteen months and as the country went into lockdown time and time again, the use of digital tools became critical in being able to work away from the office, to maintain relationship with friends and family and in containing and managing the pandemic itself through track and trace.
Yet despite this, not everyone has the digital skills to operate in this environment. As the latest Essential Digital Skills report from Lloyds Bank shows, whilst 42 million adults are able to communicate, transact, problem solve, stay safe online and handle information, 21% of the UK population (roughly 11 million people) lack the essential digital skills for everyday life.
In other words, 10 million people are not able to access the Internet themselves and lack the most basic digital tasks, 6.5 million cannot connect to Wi-Fi by themselves and 4.9 million cannot turn on a device and log into any accounts or profiles they have by themselves.
Given the increasing importance of digital to our everyday lives, this means that a fifth of the UK population are not only being marginalised and isolated but lack the basic skills required for many of the new jobs being available today.
Yes, these tend to be largely older people with a lack of formal qualifications, but it would seem there is no targeted support towards these or any other groups that need help in upskilling.
More depressingly perhaps is the finding that of all the regions and nations of the UK, Wales has the lowest proportion of adults (73%) with basic digital skills as compared to 81% for the UK as whole. Similarly, only 71% of Welsh adults have the higher level of digital skills for life, the worst in the UK.
When we examine the essential digital skills required for work, 36% of the UK workforce (or 11.8 million people) do not have the capability to do the simplest digital tasks for their employer. Again, the findings for Wales is below the UK average although it has improved during the pandemic as employees were forced to get the skills necessary to work remotely.
Over the next decade, a variety of studies show that digital skills within the workforce will be a key differentiating factor in achieving competitive advantage for regional and national economies.
Unfortunately, this study shows that the Welsh economy is in an extremely weak position when it comes to having a workforce with the digital skills required not only for the growth sectors if the future but for all industries.
So what can be done to close this gap with the rest of the UK and, more importantly, help establish Wales as a modern digital economy?
One potential contribution to this challenge was put forward over two years ago by the Newport Economic Network, a group of stakeholders formed to exploit opportunities and promote the best interests of the city.
As one of its key projects, it proposed the establishment of a National Technology Institute to produce the skills necessary for Wales to benefit from the opportunities presented by the growing importance of new digital technologies and platforms such as 5G, artificial intelligence, big data analytics, cloud computing, the internet of things, virtualisation and blockchain.
In complementing rather than competing with existing provision, the aim was to provide a more flexible and focused approach to training those looking to develop the digital skills necessary to pursue a career in the knowledge and technology sectors.
More importantly, the institute would not only be focused on educating new entrants but would include the upskilling and reskilling of existing employees within Welsh businesses to be fit for the challenges of the 21st Century workplace.
This would be done through the development an applied teaching system aligned with both the marketplace and employers which would be enhanced through a blended learning environment and a curriculum taught through a combination of academic staff and industry fellows. All courses would also be aligned to sector rather than subject requirements with students being be able to select a bespoke learning experience to suit their own career ambitions.
Most importantly and given that many of the most valuable companies in the World are based on software platforms, are less than fifteen years old and were started by young graduates, the institute would embed a culture of innovation, commercialisation and entrepreneurship in all its teaching to further enhance a learner’s future choices.
Given this exciting vision and the poor state of digital skills in Wales, you would have thought this project would have been a no-brainer for the Welsh economy. Unfortunately, a mixture of politics, entropy and apathy means that it has still to see the light of day. Of course, that is not to say that the National Technology Institute should be committed to the graveyard of great ideas that are often ignored by politicians and policymakers in Wales.
In fact, as the Lloyds bank report and other studies have indicated, there is now an even greater imperative to develop a world class applied solution to the challenge of improving digital skills within the Welsh workforce. The “new normal’ that the Welsh economy will need to cope with over the next decade will require a new approach in order to take advantage of the growth of the digital economy.
Simply put, if we do not have the workforce with the necessary digital skills to drive forward the businesses of the future, then the Welsh economy will fall further behind the rest of the UK. And whilst it is not the entire solution to this problem, a National Technology Institute, with possibly locations across Wales, could be the catalyst to help prioritise the importance of improving digital skills and creating an economic advantage for the nation going forward.