Digital competencies: A review of the literature and applications in the workplace

By Maren Oberländer, Andrea Beinicke, Tanja Bipp. Comput. Educ., 2020

312 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract In today's organisations and politics, there is a growing awareness of the gap between existing and needed digital competencies of the workforce to master the challenges of the digitalised future at work. Nevertheless, no comprehensive framework or definition of digital competencies at work has been proposed so far. Our aim is to offer a holistic view and broaden the scope of the concept of digital competencies, thereby focussing on applications at work. We combine diverse methods to integrate different perspectives on digital competencies. By conducting an extensive literature review about definitions and frameworks of digital competencies that might be applicable at work, we provide an overview of the current state of the art in research on digital competencies. Additionally, eleven half-structured interviews based on the critical incidents technique (CIT) were conducted to gain insights into the perspectives of professionals with expertise in digitalisation processes and digital competencies. Subsequently, researchers with different educational backgrounds clustered the results from both approaches and agreed on twenty-five dimensions that constitute digital competencies for white-collar workers with office jobs, encompassing a large variety of knowledge, skills, and abilities. The results of this research indicate that even though there is overlapping content, each perspective adds unique content to the concept of digital competencies at work. By creating a coherent and detailed framework and a definition, our research enhances the applicability of professional learning and development of digital competencies at work.

Subfields: Computer Science Applications, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/104c5845e70396c8c4e79cc52d4cce9c20e66726

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Citations in the corpus

The opportunities and challenges of ChatGPT in education (2023, unknown): “…de ﬁ nitions, which are based on papers and studies relevant to policy, digital competence includes not only technical knowledge of digital devices but also social and emotional aspects of utilizing and comprehending them (Oberländer et al., 2020; Sánchez-Caballé et al., 2020; Zhao et al., 2021).”
Preparing Workplaces for Digital Transformation: An Integrative Review and Framework of Multi-Level Factors (2021, background): “Digital competencies are deﬁned as a set of basic knowledge, skills, and abilities that allow workers to perform and complete their job tasks within digital work environments (Oberlander et al., 2020).”