Digital skills are essential for work and life, and especially to cope with COVID-19 challenges. As SMEs are the backbone of our society, we need to enable their increased adoption of digital skills via supporting measures. This can be done via ecosystem strengthening, strategic outlook development, structured skills development and trainings tailored to their needs.

Digital skills range from basic usage skills that enable people to participate in the digital society and consume digital goods and services, to advanced skills that empower the workforce to develop new digital goods and services. These skills can be acquired in different settings such as at work or privately, and at different life stages, for example, in schools for younger learners, or as an adult or senior citizen.

In recent years, enterprises are providing more and more training to their personnel to develop or upgrade their ICT skills. Findings from a global survey of enterprises, published by the International Labour Organization in 2021 revealed the following: In 2018, 24% of enterprises provided ICT training for their personnel. When looking at company size, 70% of large enterprises actively provided the training, while only 23% of SMEs did so. Thus, among SMEs, there are fewer ICT trainings provided. As SMEs are the backbone of the economy and digital skills are increasingly connected to how business is conducted, it is important to facilitate both the teaching and learning of digital skills among SMEs.

In developing countries, digital skills can be seen as even more crucial. As outlined in an article by Ms. Cristina Duarte, Under-Secretary-General and Special Adviser on Africa to the United Nations Secretary-General, there is a chance to leapfrog Africa’s development through digitalisation. Harnessing innovation and raising the level of ICT competencies among citizens in countries like Nigeria has enabled emerging economies to develop quickly capacities for the digital economy of the future and achieve international recognition as a tech hub.

To be continued....

Challenges to digital skills development in SMEs

Digital skills can be taught in different ways: online, offline or blended. According to UNESCO, approximately half of the world’s population (some 3.6 billion people) still lacks an internet connection. However, the digital divide is not the only obstacle that SMEs face in the acquisition of digital skills.

Based on the 2019 European Commission report Digital Skills New Professions, New Educational Methods, New Jobs, from an operational standpoint, the greatest barrier to providing digital skills training to SME employees is a lack of time. Further obstacles relate to the availability of training programmes, with cost, inflexible timetables and distance indicated as the main obstacles to participation, as well as an inability to fully understand the content of the training from the limited information provided. More barriers are outlined in Figure 2 below, which is found in the 2019 Skills for SMEs report co-produced by DIGITAL SME, Capgemini Invent, and Technopolis.


The Report on European Educational and Training Landscape and Training Needs for Citizens and SMEs for the Digital SkillUp project suggest that efforts should be made to explain emerging technologies in a simple and accessible way, providing practical and real-life use case examples. The experts contributing to the report also stressed the importance of obtaining certification and having detailed information on course quality. These two aspects would enable individuals to access learning that is better suited to their needs and select their own learning paths.

To be continued...

SMEs often do not have the necessary time, financial and human resources to foster their employees’ digital skills, especially compared to big companies. Therefore, they need support from the overall business ecosystem. The support can be in the form of having free-access training for SMEs being developed, providing funding for digitalisation the development of digital skills.

Stronger ecosystems will help SMEs to receive more support and trainings can be improved so that they can better match their needs.

As part of our contribution to the #skills4prosperity campaign, we Webclick Academy AKA WAcademy have launched the WAcademy SME Bootcamp.

WAcademy SME Bootcamp is a practical online workshop to teach specialized IT and Digital Marketing skills to help small business owners take there business to where they want it to be.

In this thread, we will be sharing various case studies where Digital Skills has been and can be a great tool to promote your SMEs.

You can also join the official Facebook Group for the project at https://www./wacademysme.

STAY TUNED.

In the meantime, you can comment the kind of service you offer below and we will share the case studies based on the highest type of service.

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