Help us create a local Playbook for digital skills!

by Helen Milner OBE and MB Christie

The Digital Skills Partnership has been set up by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to ensure everyone has the digital skills they need to thrive in today’s world and for the jobs of tomorrow.

It brings together public, private and civil society organisations to take action together that increases digital skills opportunities and connects people and organisations to the training and support they need.

Digital skills is a powerful social and economic priority. Over 11 million UK adults lack one or more of the basic/essential digital skills required for everyday life, 90% of future jobs will require digital skills, and the UK economy is losing around £63 billion a year in GDP as a result of gaps in digital skills. More background was set out in the UK Digital Strategy published by DCMS last year.

Together with MB Christie of Tech Nation, as CEO of Good Things Foundation I’m co-chairing a Delivery Group for DCMS focused on inspiring local partners to set up local Digital Skills Partnerships.

Local Digital Skills Partnerships are about a local movement for change. By getting all partners with an interest in digital skills to work together, sharing ideas and resources, we can achieve more than by working individually.

We want to see local partnerships that:

• Work across all levels of digital skills:

basic/essential digital skills (from using a device to basic online transactions)

general digital skills for life and work (from creating digital content to using Excel or Google apps), and

specialist digital skills required for digital jobs (from coding and AI to data science).

• Bring together a wide range of partners with a focus on action;
• Map need against the supply of digital skills in the local area;
• Coordinate activity on digital skills, building on successful models, filling gaps and avoiding duplication;
• Share best practice with other areas.

To aid this, we’re creating a Playbook for local partners, and we want to create it with you. Our aim is for the Playbook to be a call to action, a framework to guide set-up, and a source to find best practice. As well as setting out why local partners should work together on digital skills, it sets out what actions partners can take to have an impact. It’s aim is to be a repository of ideas, inspiration and best practice from around the country.

We’ve already spoken to a wide range of partners — from LEPs and local authorities to large corporates and civil society — to create this first draft.

What we want to do now is open it up. The Playbook should be a resource that is owned by those who will use it, and those who champion the cause of digital skills. So we want as many people and organisations as possible to co-create it.

By doing this, not only are we building our collective knowledge of best practice, we’re also building a national community of practice to drive and support the local movements we want to see.

So please do get involved — we’d love your input. The Playbook can be accessed through this Medium page, and is a live Google doc, so you should feel free to add your own material or propose changes. We’ll look at these changes weekly and build them in. And please add your name to the list at the end, so we know who has contributed.

We’ll supplement this process with discussion on Slack at a regular point each month, blogs and case studies. So watch this space.

And if you’d like to be part of the Local Delivery Group we’re running with DCMS, or take part in any future Creative Summits we host on this topic, please let us know.