The European Commission have made some waves recently when they said in a statement that “digital natives” who have grown up with technology may not be able to use digital skills in a business context. The statement was made to coincide with the launch of European e-Skills Week 2012, which aims “to inform young people on how to acquire e-skills and find jobs in the digital economy”.
The statement goes on to claim that skills learned by playing games and using social media such as Facebook and Twitter are not the digital e-skills needed in the workplace. This may be true, but it is about as useful as noting that playing football on a Saturday morning and hanging out with friends in the pub aren’t useful business skills either. Industry Commissioner Antonio Tajani appears to have forgotten the differences between leisure activities and work activities nevermind if those activities are in the real world or online.
Tajani is absolutely right that e-skills are of vital importance to our increasingly digital and knowledge based economy, and people do need to learn how to operate in the business world – using Word to write concise and referenced documents, using Powerpoint for presentations, Making basic spreadsheets, organising meetings, making efficient use of your inbox, knowing that a phone or in person meeting can be better than a long email thread. These are important skills, but they should be being taught in schools and universities – and they are (or at least were when I was in education).
Something that is missing from education, and we do need to work on is teaching young people to code. Engineering and architecture are considered “cool” occupations because you are able to build things and are popular in schools and universities – but that is exactly what programming offers. Yes most young people are not competent at coding, and we need more people to take it up as a career – but that is very different from being “digitally competent”, as most are perfectly happy using most common pieces of software on PCs and Macs.
What we should be doing is rebranding “coders” as “software architects” and “software engineers” to let young people grasp the importance of the discipline and the freedoms that it offers. We should be putting basic coding and scripting into the education syllabus, not taking IT lessons out as the current UK Government have done. We should be embracing new ideas and new ways to mash together digital content and not let lobbyists lock everything away, leaving nothing for young people to experiment with.
If we want young people to take on learning e-skills, we need to show them the benefits of doing so, not mislabelling them as digitally incompetent. And if there are certain sections of skills that need urgent work – then those areas need to be made more apparent than hiding them away in a PDF which conflates using a computer with ICT qualifications.