Building a Digital Workforce: Raising technological skills

Book excerpt: A digital divide, a chasm between those with access to technology and training, particularly workplace information technology (IT) skills and those without, threatens the economic prosperity of American workers and America's competitiveness. The most effective way to reduce digital disparities is to improve the education and training of the existing workforce. In response to challenges to America's continuing competitiveness, productivity, and workforce employability, the Digital Economic Opportunity Committee (DEOC) was formed to expand the digital workforce by identifying ways to broaden the base of workers with technical skills and to raise the technical skills of the existing workforce. DEOC defined IT workers and found that, in effect, virtually every worker in the new economy is an IT worker or an IT-enabled worker (uses computers to perform job functions). It viewed the issue as a skills gap, not a worker shortage. DEOC believed the appropriate response to this skills gap is two-fold. The first was upgrading existing worker skills through training. Issues were basic training needs, capacity, funding, and responsibility for training. DEOC's solutions for building a digital workforce were to identify skill sets needed for each IT job category, along with principal paths to job entry and for job advancement, and to define a lifelong learning system. (Appendixes include 22 notes and a summary of the Committee's Boston Conference on June 27, 2001.) (YLB).