Future-ready education: Empowering secondary school students with digital skills

With today’s massive flow of information online, acquiring digital skills has become a necessity for everyone – but especially for students – who will be entering a workforce that has been fundamentally transformed by technology.

With this in mind, we dedicated our newest Capgemini Research Institute report, Future-ready education: Empowering secondary school students with digital skills, to exploring the topic of digital skills in secondary education.

Digital literacy is now a prerequisite for professionals of all types, who must be able to navigate and participate in the digital world and to parse out useful resources from a sea of irrelevant, biased, or even false information. However, our research reveals that secondary school students are not sufficiently confident in the digital skills required to thrive in the 21st century. What’s more, this trend is particularly pronounced in students from rural areas and low-income families, creating an inequitable skills gap among students.

Based on our findings, and considering today’s rapid pace of technological change, it’s clear that governments and educational systems around the world will need to do more to prepare their students for success in the digital era. To this end, we believe it will be vital for organizations to understand the current shortcomings in digital skills preparedness as well as the steps that can be taken to address them.

In this report, we analyze the different dimensions of digital skills proficiency, including students’ confidence in their skills, teachers’ perceptions of students’ abilities, and how digital skills impact readiness for the workforce. We also explore how the emerging area of generative AI may impact and disrupt education. Finally, we provide recommendations on the actions that can be taken to further support students in developing digital skills.

Download our report to find out more about why it’s vital for students to acquire digital skills today and what we can do to better prepare them for a digital future.