Essential Digital Skills for Work 2024

There’s stability in online workplace skills following an uplift last year

The Essential Digital Skills (EDS) framework measures the UK’s digital ability across fundamental online skills; skills for your personal life; and skills for your working life. The level of online attainment which measures of having a range of digital skills needed for your working life is called Essential Digital Skills for Work (Work EDS)To have Work EDS you must have all the five Work skills – Communicating; Being Safe and Legal Online; Handling Information and Content; Transacting; and Problem Solving. There are 20 Work tasks spread out across the skill areas, geared to how UK adults fare with our increasingly digitised working environment e.g. communicating in the workplace digitally; setting up and managing an account on a professional online network; and improving productivity using digital tools. Attainment of Work EDS is unchanged compared to 2023 (82%). However, there is a slight improvement in those who can do the full scope of 20 Work tasks, nudging up to almost half (46% in 2023 vs 48% in 2024).

In the workplace, there’s a widening divide across genders when it comes to digital ability

Delving into demographics, you can see that for Work EDS, males have been steadily increasing in attainment of Work EDS across the years (from 77% in 2022 to 85% in 2024) whereas females’ performance is largely stagnant (79% in 2022 and in 2024). Further, just over half of males (52%) can do all 20 Work tasks compared to 44% of females. This is skills gap in being able to do all Work tasks has gradually increased since 2022 (44% of males vs 39% of females, a gap of 5pp versus the 8pp lead now seen with males). Gender gaps are already prevalent in the workplace when it comes to representation in senior leadership and certain industries, and it’s key that this skills gap is tackled to ensure this disparity is not compounded. 

The majority of UK adults are willing to upskill themselves for a new job

According to Totaljobs, just over 2 in 5 (42%) UK workers¹ were already looking for a new job at the end of 2024 or were planning to find one in 2025. Within our EDS study, we have found that when UK labour force adults are faced with applying for a new job that requires digital skills they don’t have, 75% would try to upskill themselves (across a range of channels). Those who have an education qualification of at least an A-Level or equivalent are most likely to do this, possibly because they have been exposed to clearer avenues toward L&D i.e. more continuous learning, and better access to training resources and professional networks.

Considering the different ways people can upskill, most (55%) would rather self-teach using resources like blogs, YouTube and TikTok. This being the most popular solution highlights the incredibly vital role that social media and user-generated content play in learning and development.

Half (49%) of the labour force also claim they would apply for a job role regardless of whether they have the necessary digital skills or not. This is most likely among those aged 25-34 (57%) and 18-24 (55%). This confidence may be related to greater proficiency with modern technology or a sense of assurance about their ability to pick up new skills.

Despite this eagerness to acquire new digital skills for work, Ipsos Karian and Box research² found that only 54% of UK employees have been given sufficient opportunities by their employers to learn new skills, highlighting a missing opportunity for workplace learning and development schemes.

Ipsos Karian and Box research also revealed that almost half (49%) of employees have not had the opportunity to learn about using AI at work, with a gap in score of 16pp between men and women. Considering Keir Starmer’s January announcement³ about the UK’s multibillion-pound investment into artificial intelligence, there may be a lot of work to do to ensure the UK labour force can keep up with these advancements. While the government will be looking to boost employee efficiency and productivity, amongst the public there are very real concerns about AI causing widespread unemployment.

Footnotes:
1 https://www.totaljobs.com/media-centre/new-year-new-career-four-million-workers-looking-for-a-new-job-in-january
2 https://ipsoskarianandbox.com/insight/66/state-of-learning-for-uk-office-employees
3 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crr05jykzkxo
 

Technical Note:
Ipsos interviewed 4,173 participants aged 18+ years in the UK (Great Britain and Northern Ireland) via their telephone Omnibus. Data are weighted to represent the UK population in terms of age, social grade, region and working status within the gender variable and additional profiles on tenure and ethnicity using PAMCo data. Data are further weighted on device ownership using data derived from a robust national survey. Within this report we have included population estimates from the survey data based on ONS 2022 mid-year stats for the UK. Full details of the range of extrapolation based on the survey margins of errors, are available in the full report.