In a increasingly digitalised world the recognition of digital skills is crucial to identify professional profiles and improve job-skills matching (see also our article).
Digital competence is also perceived as an enabler of other key competences developed at school and for life-long learning.
In order to support the validation of these skills, the European Commission has published in 2013 the first Digital Competence Framework (DigComp), designed to be a reference framework for digital competence. This means that the framework is descriptive rather than prescriptive, highlighting the importance of all competences.
Since then, two versions of the user’s guide have been released – the latest in spring 2017 – which is now a source of inspiration to help Europe respond to – and anticipate – the impact of all things digital.
This user’s guide demonstrates the inspiring level of use of DigComp to date across diverse sectors and highlights an important message: digital skills are relevant to every aspect of our lives. Digital competence means that people can use digital technology in a confident, critical and secure way.
The purpose of this Guide is to support stakeholders with the sharing of experiences of existing DigComp implementations, by describing which competences are needed today to use digital technologies in a confident, critical, collaborative and creative way to achieve goals related to work, learning, leisure, inclusion and participation in our digital society.
The competence areas include information and data literacy, communication and collaboration, digital content creation, safety, problem solving. For any area there are four proficiency levels (foundation, intermediate, advanced, highly specialised) that can be further elaborated across 8 levels offering a more detailed description of progression criteria.
The proficiency levels are inspired by the structure and vocabulary of the European Qualification Framework and are written as a combination of learning outcomes.
The DigComp framework defines the scope and the components of digital competence for citizens in a clear way. It provides an overall, complete and shared understanding of what digital competence is, and offers an updated vocabulary based on consensus building with multiple stakeholders.
The guide includes case studies of good practices from European countries on policies for digital competences improvement and validation.
Download the document here