EU Commission presents online tool for testing digital skills

According to the latest Digital Economy and Society Index 44 percent of Europeans do not have basic digital skills. This means that large sections of European society are not yet able to fully benefit from the opportunities offered by new digital technologies. In order to strengthen digital skills across the board, the European Commission therefore presented a new multilingual online tool in December to help people assess their own digital skills. Based on the test result, individual strengths and weaknesses can be identified in order to subsequently find suitable training opportunities, but also to make up for individual deficits through suitable training and learning opportunities in order to be more successful in the digital world in the future. The online test itself takes around 20 minutes and is available in the 24 official EU languages as well as Icelandic, Norwegian, Turkish, Serbian and Macedonian. The questions are based on the Digital Competence Framework 2.1 (DigComp) and cover its five areas: Information and Data Literacy, Communication and Collaboration, Digital Content Creation, Security and Problem Solving. On completion of the online test, the user receives their overall score and the respective scores in each of the five DigComp competence areas listed above. The test taker can also download a report and save the results of the digital skills identified in their own Europass profile. In addition, the internet platform also suggests open online training opportunities to help strengthen skills in each of the five areas. The test can be taken multiple times to monitor progress and select the right training at the right time. The test is provided as open source software so that any organization, company or institution can integrate the test into their platform, application or service. The tool is the result of a project funded by the European Parliament.