by Silvano De Marte, The Digital Collective, Belgium.
“What cannot be measured, cannot be improved,” said Peter Drucker. In a world with a growing digital skills gap, The Digital Collective (DigiCo) developed Skillify to provide a unified assessment framework across European training providers and give users a tailored pathway to improve their digital skills. This free online tool walks you through different questions involving your digital literacy level to provide a detailed report on your digital skills and personalised training recommendations to continue your learning journey.
Skillify was created by DigiCo, a non-profit organisation based in Brussels whose mission is to close the digital skills gap and improve access to employment for vulnerable individuals across Europe. They partner with different organisations to create a collective of like-minded institutions working towards the digital inclusion of the most in need.
As a collective, DigiCo provides financial and technical support to organisations providing impactful digital literacy training programs. Their targeted approach addresses those who are both socially and digitally vulnerable, such as older people, refugees and migrants, among others. This means that they specifically focus on basic digital skills, as they provide individuals at the margins of society with the skills and confidence they need to prosper in life and work in an ever-changing digital world.
Skillify is a self-assessment to help you understand your level of digital skills in 21 different topics. It follows the Digital Competence Framework for Citizens (DigComp), developed by the European Commission to offer a tool to improve citizens’ digital capacities. Skillify covers the 21 individual competencies and five areas listed in this model: Information and Data Literacy, Communication and Collaboration, Digital Content Creation, Safety and Problem Solving. This is done through 82 short and practical questions, with 4-level scale answers that cover knowledge, skills and attitudes. These competencies are developed across eight proficiency levels, from foundation/beginner to highly specialised.
As Skillify has five sections, which match each competence area of the DigComp Framework, users can take all the areas of the self-assessment together or separately. Completing all five sections takes about 20 to 30 minutes, depending on the user. Skillify is made barrier-free to enhance usability: individuals can take the test immediately and do not need to register at the beginning of it. Instead, they can opt to register at the end, with simple contact and demographic details.
Revamped again this year, Skillify has a double value as a measuring tool for digital skills:
1- From a user perspective:
- It is designed to give a quick, safe and friendly user experience to both inexperienced and more experienced users alike
- It is available in six different languages to better adapt to the local context
- It can be used on a wide array of screen sizes as it is adaptable
- The test is reliable when it comes to the digital proficiency of a person, as it was designed following the DigComp framework
- The test’s uniqueness is highlighted thanks to the training recommendations it offers for future development
2- From a training provider perspective:
- It can provide an effective and streamlined process to measure digital skills systematically, aligned to the DigComp framework
- It can be significantly customised. For example, thanks to its five components, organisations can divide the test and create shorter single DigComp area assessments to better focus on the objectives of their training, or translate the test into a particular language
- Admin access allows the training provider a reporting functionality that gathers data from their students in an aggregated way
Additional to the 82 self-assessment questions, at the end of each competence area Skillify adds testing questions – which are dependent on the answers given. There is one optional testing question for each of the 21 competencies, and these are only presented to the user if he or she is Intermediate or above in any given competence. They were developed to give an element of challenge for the user and for training partners to have a degree of validation of the results.
Once the test is completed, users can see a range of suggested free or low-cost courses for continuing their learnings, along with a preview of their results. Individuals can go back to their outcomes whenever they want through their User Dashboard. They can also download a PDF report for each competence area result.
So far, Skillify is available in six languages: English, Czech, French, German, Ukrainian, and the recently deployed Arabic. More languages will be added as DigiCo continues to grow and onboard new partners in different countries.
Would you like to take the Skillify assessment for free and measure your level of digital skills? Then visit.
For more information, please contact Léa Ichikawa: lea@digico.global
Author
Silvano De Marte, Communications & Community Engagement Officer, The Digital Collective, Belgium
