We recently had the honour to attend a very interesting digital event run by Lloyds Bank – The Consumer Digital Index 2021 conference – that focused on the consumer behaviour and digital skills needed today. Organizations such as Good Things, BT and Ministers from the department of digital and education helped shed light on this subject with their insights. We all know how the pandemic had a huge impact on our society as Covid raised the demand for digital skills and now 1.5 million people are using the internet.  

The conference aimed to explore the importance of digital skills and despite the rising number of online engagement, there still is a large digital exclusion gap that we as a digital training provider have as a mission to narrow. This gap is often due to the lack of financial resources and the ability to access free online features. Ideas to tackle this exclusion were discussed during the event, and very promising solutions were explored by combining local authorities’ efforts and governmental funds and bursaries. Thus, digitalising is becoming compulsory and we have the necessary information and tools to help Black businesses, professionals and young people do that as we recognised through research and by attending this conference that “ethnic minorities are the ones who struggle the most to access digital training”.

Although with the rising demand for digital skills in the workforce due to the pandemic, the digital divide is still an important issue to be solved. Institutions and organizations now face the important task of finding the right solution to close the gap. Indeed,  2.6 Million people are still struggling to get online due to the lack of information about the importance of upskilling.  People feel reluctant when it comes to investing in IT training, not only because they don’t believe they need it but also because they don’t know where to find proper training. Businesses struggle to understand what kind of skills their employees need to excel and make their business grow. So the lack of this understanding is preventing businesses from seeing the benefits of these investments in the long term.  Senior leaders engagement is important, leaders driving the action may make people understand why they should upskill so a good approach to get this information inside the mindset of businesses is to educate the leaders with the necessary knowledge, reinforcing the importance of upskilling and make them visualise where they can get if they invest in training their staff. Help them recognise what skills each different business sector needs to achieve this digital competency. 

Moreover, during the conference, it has been highlighted the importance of the cooperation between the government and the organisations, to recognise the strategy to reduce the digital exclusion and to improve the number of people who could gain the digital skills required nowadays, to step up in their life and obviously in their career. Indeed, the covid brought so many redundancies into the society. Caroline Dinenage Minister for Digital and Culture Department said that the government invested £2.5 million in Digital Lifeline Fund for people with learning disabilities releasing a strategic plan “putting thousands of devices in the hands of those who need them most, with free data and tech support on standby to help people with learning disabilities.”- she said. They also invested in a National Skills Fund creating 70 courses offering level 3 fully funded courses for adults over 18 years old,  including courses to digitally upskill. 

Therefore, it was interesting to recognise the points of view made by some professionals during the conference, mentioning the fact that mature people have a different perception of learning digital skills.  It is relevant to demystify the shame in admitting that as a professional you need to learn more digital skills to progress in your career. educating everyone to understand that investing in self-development is an opportunity and not a chore.

To conclude, we believe that the conference that we attended was very insightful to gain an understanding of what is happening in terms of digital exclusion and upskilling in our society and the efforts that organisations and institutions are implementing to reduce the gap. It has a combined strategy starting with the local authorities to then expand nationally so ethnic minorities, businesses, professionals, students, everyone can have the same opportunities to learn.