Benefits of Digitally Literate Employees

Skilled employees enable organisations to use technology more effectively, leading to increases in productivity and competitiveness and ensuring that operational objectives are achieved more efficiently.  Moreover, digitally literate employees will also communicate more effectively both internally and externally to the clients and stakeholders of an organisation.

An ICT-skilled workforce improves the efficiency and boosts the productivity of individual organisations, which in turn acts as a driver for growth in the economy as a whole. Read the 2011 ECDL Foundation position paper on e-Productivity for further details.

A 2010 industry study (ALBA Study) demonstrates how ICT-trained employees are more efficient, work quicker, and make fewer mistakes; and the time that supervisors and other colleagues spend dealing with difficulties is halved where employees have been trained. Companies also benefit by having more accurate knowledge about the skill levels of employees and can therefore deploy them more effectively.

An Italian study on the ‘Cost of Ignorance’ found that ECDL / ICDL certification gives a total return on investment of €2,261 per person annually as well as 47% competence increase from pre-training levels. Click here to download.

Digitally literate employees add real value to an organisation:

• Increase the overall efficiency and productivity
• Achieve specific goals and objectives more effectively
• Ensure unnecessary administrative burdens are reduced or eliminated
• Significantly enhance internal and external communication within an organisation
• Ensure a greater uptake and utilisation of technology, resulting in greater returns on investment in that technology
• Employees’ confidence and job satisfaction are increased
• Unnecessary time and money wasted through incompetence is eliminated

 

Sample differences between employees with ICT skills and those without:

Digitally illiterate employees	Digitally literate employees
Spend time trying to find and use a function that they ‘know’ the application can carry out	Actually know the functions of their applications and use them to carry out tasks in seconds
Phone helpdesk/tech support to install and set up devices and drivers and lose productivity whilst waiting for assistance	Install devices independently, set it up and get on with their jobs
Waste time typing individual letters, envelope labels and other communications targeted at large groups	Use mail merge in word processing to get the job done in a short amount of time
Spend a lot of time producing poor quality documents and presentations, which often need revision	Produce professional quality documents and presentations efficiently without support from other staff
Manually input calculable data into spreadsheets increasing the risk of errors	Use formulas and functions to efficiently and effectively carry out complex calculations
Struggle with databases and are 'afraid' of the application	Confidently run queries and generate reports displaying information that would take time to produce manually
Have difficulty managing their emails and are unaware of associated security risks	Manage emails effectively, understand associated risks and keep the organisation's systems secure