Introduction

With major broadband funding programs well underway and widespread agreement on the importance of a broadband connection, all eyes in the connectivity policy space are set on closing the digital divide. A major part of these efforts centers around ensuring that populations have the necessary skill sets to safely and effectively use the internet and connected devices, perform everyday online tasks, and sign up for broadband affordability programs if necessary—abilities that are collectively known as “digital skills.”

Digital skills play a critical role in broadband adoption and have an incredible value of their own. Advancing them is a fundamental part of any national effort to close the digital divide. In the United States, however, a lack of consensus on how to define or measure necessary digital skills—in other words, lack of a shared digital skills “framework”—hampers any attempt to cohesively upskill. Without that framework, those working to measure and fill digital skills gaps must rely on competing definitions of digital literacy and multiple piecemeal studies that, where they exist, take various approaches to measuring digital skills.

This is all coming to a head with the implementation of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) programs, which target various causes of the digital divide.¹ Advancing digital skills is among the goals of several of these programs, and program guidelines rightly emphasize the importance of providing measurable objectives. As it stands, our current fragmented understanding of digital skills could feed into incompatible assessments of IIJA implementation and achievement of disparate goals, leaving us no closer to a national understanding of our digital skill level and competence.

If measuring progress within states is an already-defined goal, measuring progress among states is better. And with all states and territories currently focused to some degree on digital upskilling, this is the optimal time to start working toward a national framework. The current state-level focus on digital skills should generate a rich landscape of new data that can inform a nationwide digital skills strategy, and the current policy momentum can help incentivize the creation of that strategy. At best, early formation of that framework could help guide states’ implementation of their plans toward a shared objective. And recent emphasis by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on digital upskilling offers relevant precedent for institutional interest in taking a unified approach to digital upskilling.

This report argues for the establishment of a national digital skills framework in the United States. It then examines the landscape of existing resources, including some major frameworks that are used both domestically and abroad. Finally, it explores some of the policy avenues available should the United States decide to establish a national digital skills framework. If we start work on that framework now, we can ensure that our post-IIJA digital inclusion strategy is informed by a consistent, data-driven understanding of where our digital skill levels are and where we want them to be.

Digital skills broadly refer to the individual’s ability to interact with current technology in adherence to minimum standards set by society to achieve certain goals or outcomes. Those outcomes often involve participation in societal institutions and collaboration with other members of the society. Digital skills or competencies are also sometimes referred to as digital literacy—often in an educational context—or even digital resilience, which emphasizes the need for populations to adapt to changing technologies over time.² The broadness of this definition leaves room for varying interpretations.

At a global level, the International Telecommunication Union, borrowing from the UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development, defines digital competence as “the knowledge and skills required for an individual to be able to use ICT [information and communications technology] to accomplish goals in his or her personal and professional life.”³ The European Commission further defines digital competence as a combination of knowledge, skills and attitudes that enable “the confident, critical and responsible use of, and engagement with, digital technologies for learning, at work, and for participation in society.”⁴

In the United States, Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act funding in contexts like adult education and workforce training relies on a broad definition of digital skills as “the skills associated with (a) using technology to enable users to find, evaluate, organize, create, and communicate information; and (b) developing digital citizenship and the responsible use of technology.”⁵ The American Library Association’s Digital Literacy Task Force similarly defines digital literacy as “the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create and communicate information, requiring both cognitive and technical skills.”⁶

Various groups have refined these and related terms based on their own assessments of the landscape. For example, the Digital US coalition reports that “digital resilience is having the awareness, skills, agility, and confidence to be empowered users of new technologies and adapt to changing digital skill demands. Digital resilience improves capacity to problem-solve and upskill, navigate digital transformations, and be active participants in society and the economy.”⁷ The National Digital Inclusion Alliance puts forth a number of traits that a person with digital literacy skills must possess, including that they “[use] these skills to actively participate in civic society and contribute to a vibrant, informed, and engaged community.”⁸

Though specific definitions vary, they all describe an individual with the capacity to wield today’s technologies effectively. In short, if broadband is the infrastructure of a digital society, digital skills are the population’s ability to participate in that society.

Digital skills gaps and lack of broadband access often coincide. Because systemic inequities cause disparities in everything from internet access to education to income levels, historically marginalized groups like people of color and people with disabilities often underperform in digital skills statistics, just as they are overrepresented in non-adoption statistics.⁹ One reason for this is that the real or perceived utility of a broadband connection plays a direct role in adoption: Surveys that explore the reasons behind non-adoption commonly attribute it to lack of interest or lack of perceived usefulness of a connection.¹⁰ Especially when the former implies the latter, lack of interest can be caused by low digital skills that render individuals unable to see the value of an internet connection. Higher levels of digital skills have been linked to higher rates of adoption and more trust in institutions like libraries that frequently provide information about affordability plans and other services.¹¹

In addition to playing a role in broadband access, digital skills have taken on a value of their own. The National Skills Coalition has previously found that 92 percent of jobs across all industries in the United States require at least some digital skills.¹² For those workers who do qualify for a job that requires digital skills, average income increases by an average of 23 percent, or $8,000 for a single worker per year.¹³ Some vital resources, such as applications for government assistance programs, are only—or most easily—accessible online.¹⁴ At a global scale, digital skills are now included in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, and major organizations like the World Bank and World Economic Forum have dedicated resources to advancing them across the world.¹⁵

Digital skills tend to increase naturally alongside technological advances, but disparities in those advances also fall along familiar lines. A 2021 survey of the global workforce found that, while almost half of workers improved their digital skills in the COVID-19 lockdown period and the majority had confidence in their abilities to adapt to new technologies, those gains varied widely based on factors like gender, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity.¹⁶ Gaps also tend to be self-reinforcing: People with stronger digital skills, for example, are more likely to seek further upskilling than those with weaker skills.¹⁷

Despite the broad importance of the topic, the United States does not have a clear and defined digital skills framework that sets out benchmark skills and the requirements for achieving them or even a consistent method of measuring current digital skill rates across the country. This absence of data hampers any attempt to effectively and uniformly build our collective digital skills.