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How do you assess and measure employee digital literacy? It’s an issue that’s coming to the fore as more organizations look to become more AI-ready and upskilling takes on more urgency.
Assessing digital literacy isn't straightforward — it comes with challenges around scaling, knowing what to measure and taking the right approach in implementation. So how do you start?
Table of Contents
- Why Digital Literacy Matters in 2025
- Digital Literacy, a Priority for the Digital Workplace Team
- The Rise of Digital Literacy Debt
- Common Challenges in Measuring Digital Skills
- Digital Literacy Assessment Methods and Frameworks
- A Granular Approach to Digital Literacy Assessment
- Other Methods to Assess Digital Skills
- Best Practices for Digital Literacy Assessments
Why Digital Literacy Matters in 2025
Arguably, employee digital literacy and skills have never been more important. Workers can expect 39% of their current skillset to be “transformed or become redundant,” according to the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs report. Moreover, 59% of employees will need to be upskilled or retrained by 2030.
Generative AI and tools such as Microsoft Copilot have also put more of a focus on AI literacy. Many organizations are rolling out education programs that help employees use these new AI tools. IKEA, for example, is developing AI-related courses and training for its 160,000-member workforce.
And with jobs and technology continually changing, a blend of digital and human capabilities will prove critical for a future-ready workforce.
Digital Literacy, a Priority for the Digital Workplace Team
Efforts to improve employee digital competency are nothing new. Ford's “digital worker” program was launched back in the 2000s.
Digital workplace teams have long been involved in raising employee digital literacy, both in launching tools but also in ongoing adoption. The introduction of Microsoft 365 and the switch to remote working during the pandemic often involved workplace digital training and support to increase digital dexterity.
Today’s digital workplace teams have a range of methods to raise digital literacy and improve tool use. Reworked's State of the Digital Workplace report reveals the top five methods to support literacy:
- E-learning
- Self-help resources
- Embedded training within applications
- Digital communications
- Peer-driven champions networks
These methods aren’t surprising. However, fewer than one in five organizations (18%) actually have a formal digital literacy program, meaning that these training approaches may be tied more to a specific technology such as Microsoft 365 or AI rather than a wider scope.
The Rise of Digital Literacy Debt
Organizations with established digital literacy programs and assessment frameworks have an advantage in supporting AI literacy because they more easily adapt their existing approaches, said Elizabeth Marsh, director of Digital Work Research, academic and expert on digital literacy in the workplace.
At the same time, organizations that have not made the investment are experiencing what Marsh calls “digital literacy debt” — akin to technical debt — as they roll out AI literacy programs and find a wider digital skills gap. In these cases, assessing digital skills becomes more important.
“There’s still a lot of gaps in basic digital literacy and data literacy, and these are being revealed as they introduce AI tools,” Marsh said. “When organizations have got to catch up, it's even more important to start with assessing skills, to understand where people are at.”
Common Challenges in Measuring Digital Skills
Digital literacy assessment and skill level measurement — regardless of scope — is important for any upskilling effort:
- Know where the gaps and issues lie with digital skills to design training and implementation but also accompany communication and change management efforts.
- Have baseline information to track success and see what approaches are working and make improvements if necessary.
- Assess skills at an individual level to motivate and guide employees on areas of focus, drive momentum to make progress and establish a culture of learning and improvement.
- Assessment in specific areas also drives business goals, including improving adoption of technology such as AI or a tool like Microsoft Teams.
But there are some challenges.
- How do you determine which digital skills to assess in your workplace?
- What should be the focus and scope of the digital assessment?
- How do you scale digital skills assessment in larger enterprises?
- How do you position digital skills assessment so employees don’t feel they are being judged or their privacy is compromised?
- How do you ensure the digital literacy assessment contributes to strategic and operational goals?
None of these above questions are straightforward.
Digital Literacy Assessment Methods and Frameworks
At a surface level, assessing digital skills sounds like it is about measuring levels of competence in using digital tools, but the focus actually needs to be broader, Marsh said. "Levels of competence in using digital tools are clearly foundational, but it’s not enough just to assess that aspect,” she said. “Awareness, attitude and mindset are also key. We need a really holistic approach to assessing digital skills.”
While understanding skills guides teams to design the necessary training and interventions, knowing about levels of awareness influences accompanying communications and attitudinal elements helps figure out the best approach. This helps digital workplace teams design a more effective digital literacy program that focuses on changing behavior, which drives sustainable adoption and value.
Self-Assessment Surveys: The Scalable Solution
To assess skills, awareness and attitudes, Marsh advocated for a self-assessment approach, likely based on a survey. “You're going to do some kind of self-assessment tool, which might have statements about how people feel about different aspects in the environment and how they see their capabilities,” she said. “Presenting them with scenarios can also help enrich the data.”
While self-assessment has some limitations in terms of people’s perceptions of their abilities rather than their actual skills, it is far more scalable across an organization than testing digital capabilities, Marsh said.
It was also important for people to respond honestly and frankly so not to skew results. “It is often better to have the survey anonymous, especially if there are fears about being penalized for poor digital skills,” Marsh said.
Positioning the digital skills assessment is vital. "Some of the really good holistic initiatives we've seen are very clearly positioned about enabling people and helping them to flourish,” said Marsh. “Employees know their data is being used ethically and it is contextualized as a positive experience that you can kind of advance your own skills.”
Using Existing Competency Frameworks
Self-assessing digital skills does take some time to come up with the survey categories and questions. However, you can start with a number of open source digital literacy frameworks.
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Marsh, for example, has designed a digital workplace skills framework that has already been used by multiple organizations and thousands of employees. It covers four quadrants from “Using the digital workplace” to the ability to “Create and connect.” She also designed an accompanying assessment survey; more recently, the framework has also been adapted to focus on AI literacy.
Public bodies and academic institutions have created other assessment frameworks, such as the EU’s digital skills assessment tool and its European Digital Competence Framework.
Remember Digital Workplace Professionals
Ironically, one of the groups where digital literacy and related skills are important but have been hard to assess are intranet and digital workplace professionals. Often, they are tasked with driving user adoption of digital tools, and competence and confidence plays an important role in improving usage. But digital workplace and intranet teams require knowledge and skills from a wider number of areas.
"The digital workplace domain lies at the intersection between many different disciplines, often better defined and more readily hosted within functions such as Communications or IT,” said my colleague Chris Tubb, digital workplace and intranet consultant at Spark Trajectory. Many of the necessary skills and practices don't always feel natural to people from a technical or comms background, he said.
To make it easier for digital workplace and intranet teams to identify and assess skills they require to be effective, Tubb and I co-created a skills matrix specifically aimed at intranet and digital workplace professionals. This has been open sourced for any digital professional to use.
The skills matrix defines 45 areas of practice and three skill levels for teams to identify gaps and map responsibilities to be covered or outsourced, Tubb said. The center of the matrix is a series of skills specific to the intranet and digital workplace domain, he added.
Case Study: How NEXTDC Measures Digital Skills
NEXTDC has successfully assessed digital skills and linking them to specific business outcomes.
NEXTDC is Australia’s largest locally owned and operated data center provider. As a technology company where security is also paramount, the company wants to ensure technology is adopted in the best way possible. Here the team took a skills and competency-based approach with high-touch training and support for sustainable adoption of Microsoft 365 and related tools.
“Microsoft 365 evolves rapidly and most staff simply don’t have the capacity to keep pace with ongoing changes or grasp how these shifts affect their digital ways of working,” said Peta Vigor, business transformation program manager, NEXTDC. "Focused support helps them identify which skills are essential, which tools to adopt, and which functionalities are less relevant to their roles.”
To improve digital skills, NEXTDC used Step Two’s “Waves” methodology, a practical digital literacy framework that focuses on skills relating to specific business scenarios rather than more generic concepts.
For example, a priority for NEXTDC was to make Microsoft Teams its primary place for internal collaboration and document storage. Here the team focused on the digital skills users need around two main scenarios: “Working as a team” and “Working with files.”
By focusing on the targeted scenarios where the team wanted to build competence helped NEXTDC get better results.
A Granular Approach to Digital Literacy Assessment
The Waves methodology also defines skills and competencies required for each business scenario to a granular level. At NEXTDC, the team defined the skills and competencies for three levels:
- Bronze: skills everyone should know
- Silver: what most people should know
- Gold: what key individuals need to know
Each level has 10 or 11 expected competencies, ranging from managing Teams notifications (all users) to archiving a Teams space (key users).
This granularity helps the team assess levels of digital competence and confidence, as well as the training required. “After exploring external training providers, we found their lesson plans didn’t align well with our collaboration project,” Vigor said. “Instead of a generic approach, we introduced a self-assessment survey to gauge the existing digital capabilities of our employees and identify specific skill gaps.”
This granular approach also meant the team built on what people were already doing well and track progress, via a follow-up skills assessment survey.
Other Methods to Assess Digital Skills
The team uses other data inputs to help assess digital skills, Vigor said. “We gather quantifiable feedback through direct conversations with managers and employees, and we monitor usage patterns via Orchestry and M365 dashboards to see how tools are being adopted across the digital workplace,” she said. They also solicit insights and observations from super users.
When it comes to actually designing the training, the Waves methodology considers different preferences for styles or “modes” of learning across individual users. his element is important, Vigor said.
“People learn in different ways and need the flexibility to engage with training on their own terms,” Vigor said. “Our workforce includes employees on varying shift patterns, so traditional online training doesn’t always work. Ensuring learning is accessible and adaptable is a core consideration in how we design all of our training initiatives.”
Best Practices for Digital Literacy Assessments
Successfully implementing digital literacy assessments requires more than selecting the right framework or survey tool. Based on the experiences of organizations like NEXTDC and insights from the digital workplace experts above, several key practices emerge that can make the difference between a one-time skills audit and a sustainable program that drives real behavior change.
These best practices address the common pitfalls that derail assessment initiatives — from low participation rates due to employee anxiety about being judged, to generic approaches that fail to connect with specific business needs. By following these proven strategies, organizations can create assessment programs that employees engage with willingly and that generate actionable insights for targeted upskilling efforts.
- Use self-assessment surveys for scalability.
- Make assessments anonymous to encourage honest responses.
- Position assessments positively as enablement tools, not judgment.
- Focus on skills, awareness and attitudes.
- Define competencies at granular levels.
- Use business scenario-based frameworks rather than generic.
- Combine multiple data sources — surveys, usage analytics, manager feedback.
- Accommodate different learning preferences and work patterns.
Digital literacy in the workplace is likely to become more important. Organizations that assess where they are plan better for the future, while those employees who understand where they are and where they want to be are more likely to thrive.
