The Case for a National Framework

There is already broad institutional buy-in across the United States on the importance of closing the digital divide. The now-lapsed Affordable Connectivity Program administered by the FCC was fiercely supported by a wide range of stakeholders.¹ At the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), a number of large broadband funding programs initiated under the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which are now in various stages of implementation, put enormous amounts of money toward addressing gaps in broadband access.² The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program allocates $42.45 billion to states and territories to complete broadband deployment, and any remaining funds can be put toward inclusion concerns.³ The Digital Equity Act (DEA) puts $2.75 billion directly into addressing digital inclusion issues like affordability and digital upskilling.⁴ States are required to document their own digital inclusion assets, needs, and objectives, and program participants must conduct ongoing assessments of their programs’ efficacy.⁵ Therefore, to the extent digital skills play into broadband adoption and digital inclusion, standardizing them could codify a shared goal for program participants and enable a comprehensive national perspective on the issue.

Indeed, digital skills should play a very important role in those programs according to the previous charter of the Federal Communications Commission’s Communications Equity and Diversity Council (CEDC), which included a workstream on digital upskilling that advised states to prioritize digital skills “learning and training” in the digital equity and broadband access plans designed under the IIJA.⁶ The digital upskilling workstream, which focused on aligning the U.S. population’s digital skills with modern-day needs, produced a report that was subsequently adopted by the Commission. The report advised the United States to adopt a formalized digital skills strategy and to prioritize measurement of digital skills and related programs.⁷ In particular, it identified IIJA programs as an important and timely vehicle for national digital upskilling. But despite widespread agreement on the importance of digital skills, the United States currently has reached no consensus on which skills are necessary or how to measure them.

In the absence of this shared perspective, states and other program stakeholders must cobble together various sources to assess their own digital skills landscapes. Various workstreams in the United States are focused on taxonomizing digital skills literature and conducting landscape scans to guide interested parties. In particular, several helpful resources have emerged in anticipation of programs under the IIJA. For example, in 2022, the National Governors Association Workforce Innovation Network—in partnership with the National Skills Coalition (NSC), World Education, and National Digital Inclusion Alliance—released a playbook advising states on how to take a data-driven approach to digital upskilling.⁸ This included a list of datasets that—both directly and indirectly—could be used to assess current rates of digital skills, in addition to guidance on how states could create their own surveys. It also outlined relevant global and international digital skills frameworks for states to use as models. In the same vein, the NSC released a blog instructing states on how to measure digital skills through methods like assessing proxy data or designing skills surveys.⁹

Though the landscape is certainly not devoid of guidance or even useful data, the lack of consensus on a framework means that states could follow these types of guidelines to the letter and still end up with incompatible assessments of their populations’ skills. Even with robust guidance, achieving a national understanding of where we stand on digital skills remains out of reach.

Despite setting overarching goals for broadband access, the United States has unsurprisingly tended to take a less centralized approach to broadband policy. In particular, major programs under the IIJA leave it in large part to states and territories to design and implement their own specific plans for closing the digital divide.¹⁰ But standardization of relevant metrics and goals is the missing link toward countrywide attainment of digital upskilling goals. National standardized testing is an important tool that helps measure and guide national educational attainment, even though, for example, state educational requirements may differ. The same can be said for digital skills.

A common refrain among groups interested in digital skills is the benefits of a shared language and agreed-upon definitions.¹¹ Shared language and mutually understood objectives allow various parties to work cohesively toward the same overarching goal. If digitally upskilling the U.S. population is really a top priority—and it should be—we first need an established framework that defines and categorizes necessary skill sets and indicates standardized methods of measuring them. Current policy goals and ongoing (and forthcoming) programs would benefit enormously from that framework, and the window of opportunity is closing.