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More than ever, Digital literacy has become extremely vital for navigating your personal and professional life. Once you get to a stage where you feel confident in your computer literacy, it becomes easier to transition into learning about digital literacy. Similar to computer literacy, it has become more compulsory for higher education students and employees to be digitally literate and this is why it is best to capacitate yourself with digital skills early as possible. Fortunately, other institutions may embed digital skills into the first-year courses as part of the first-year experience because they recognize its importance.

What is Digital Literacy?

According to Developing Employability, “Digital literacy is the ability to identify and use technology confidently, creatively and critically to meet the demands and challenges of life, learning and work in a digital society”. In other words, it is having the skills you need to live, learn, and work in a society where communication and access to information occur more and more through digital technologies like internet platforms, social media, and smartphones.

Why is it important?

It’s important to understand the being digitally literate is more than just knowing how to use technology, it’s knowing how to navigate effectively in a digitally enhanced environment. This may be in your social, cultural life, learning life, and/or working life. It’s about recognizing the ability to transfer digital skills that you’ve learned from one situation and moving across one platform to another application seamlessly. All you need to do is to build a solid foundation and then working on strengthening your digital footprint.

It also becomes really important in the future when you enter the professional world. The requirement for digital skills is higher in professional careers. A 2017 study from the European Commission found that 90% of professionals are required to possess at least basic digital skills. In your workplace, you’ll be required to interact with people in digital environments, use information in appropriate ways, and create new ideas and products collaboratively. Above all, you’ll need to maintain your digital identity and wellbeing as the digital world continues to change at a fast pace.

Without these digital literacy competencies, people struggle to thrive in a technology-driven society. For instance, the working world needs graduates and employees who are able to:

• Utilize digital tools for communicating, collaborating, and solving problems
• Find, evaluate and use online resources
• Produce and effectively share knowledge
• Create online content, not just be consumers of content
• Curate data and media sources

5 Key Digital Literacy skills and how to Apply them

1. Photo-visual literacy: This is the ability to recognize a photo or infographic and be able to understand the symbolism behind them. So, you’re able to “read” the photo on the screen intuitively and understand the instruction and the message behind the visual. For example, if you see a photo of a small trash bin, you immediately understand that it means “delete”.  
2. Socio-emotional Literacy: This is the ability to identify the advantage of working in the digital space but also identifying the “traps” and dangers that may come with working in cyberspace and how to avoid them.
3. Information Literacy: The ability to know when there is a need for information and using that information for the problem at hand. It’s also having skepticism when consuming information. For example, knowing how to identify fake news in the age of misinformation.
4. Reproduction literacy: Digital reproduction literacy is the ability to create a meaningful, authentic, and creative work or interpretation, by integrating existing independent pieces of information.
5. Branching Literacy: Branching literacy is understanding the complexity of cyberspace. For many, it might come quite naturally after years of understanding how the digital world operates. It is the ability to navigate the internet and databases without getting “lost” in cyberspace.  In simple terms, it involves making a mental note of how you got to a certain page once you are there, how to leave it, opening other tabs, choosing options based on visuals, etc.

Digital skills that can make you employable in the workplace:

1. Social Media skills
2. Analytics
3. Understanding collaboration and project management tools – Google Drive, Asana, Trello
4. Content Marketing – blog posts, videos, podcasts, infographics, social media status updates
5. Strategy and Planning
6. Emails, google calendar
7. Fluency in choosing the right device and software
8. Awareness of digital trends

How do I learn digital skills?

The inevitable part of living in the digital era is that being digitally literate can help you advance your ability to participate in the economy. All organizations in the digital economy, are coming to realise that digital skills are vital for employees in the digital era. Especially in the covid-19 shifted world, it is more important than ever that new employees are cross-disciplined and have both hard and soft skills.  Whatever the specific job you are interviewing for, recruiters will be looking out for a wider skill set and broader experience in their recruitment.

• Watch YouTube

Another way to learn about digital is online (i.e. digitally)! And you don’t even have to read. There are YouTube videos for everything and it’s not just a website – it’s the world’s second-largest search engine

• Take a course

If you find it hard to dedicate time to self-learning, then committing to a course – either free online or classroom-based – might be what you need. Another option is presenting it to your manager as being relevant for your career development then it’s worth asking if your workplace will fund it.

• Find a teacher

If you’re a working person, ask someone digitally savvy in your office to help you learn. Or you can ask someone in your family, community, varsity to teach you.

This year has seen a significant increase in interviews being conducted virtually due to the contact restrictions necessary because of COVID-19. It is predicted that this form of interviewing will continue to be favoured even after we can resume traditional face-to-face meetings. We’ve discussed how to prepare for a virtual interview in another post, now we will focus on some of the unique opportunities this type of interviewing offers candidate.

Control over your environment

One of the simplest advantages of the virtual interview is that you have control over the environment that you occupy for the duration of your interview. You can prepare it in a way that is comfortable for you, get the lighting just right and have resources around you that are out of the line of site of the interviewer.

Take advantage of the autonomy you have, by not being in the actual room with your interviewers, by having detailed notes on all your skills and previous experience that correlate with the requirements in the job specification you are interviewing for. You can prepare notes of real-life scenarios from your current and past roles (professional or extra-curricular) typed in detail with keywords highlighted so that you can easily refer to them during the interview as necessary. Be careful not to read back rehearsed answers to interview questions though, as this will appear very unprofessional. Your notes are there as a tool to trigger your memory and order your thoughts as you respond to questions. If you can, have them visible on a different device to the one you are doing the meeting on, or print your notes.

You can have someone whom you trust to sit in on the interview but off-camera. They can assist you with holding up or opening the documents you need to refer to, signal to you whether you need to add more details to your responses or when you are wandering off the point. Think of this person as a director (as in TV or film), who is helping you put your best presentation forward and keep you grounded in the flow of the interview. This approach may be useful to someone who is new to the job market and needs some coaching and guidance to get through the interview in a professional and confident manner. Often when candidates don’t have much experience, they tend to be extremely nervous during interviews and don’t provide sufficient or the most significant responses to questions.

Take advantage of the digital tools available

With a virtual interview, you have the benefit of having a number of tools at your disposal that you otherwise would not. You can share presentations, graphs, reports, videos, and images to illustrate or accentuate your skills and experience. This may not be practical or applicable to all careers, but some examples of how it may be useful include:

Example 1

You are applying for funding to do post-graduate studies in Film and Media and you are meeting with different bursars to show why you are an excellent candidate. Having a 3 short sound and video clips of topical discussions you hosted as a campus DJ, conference facilitator, and event MC to share during your interview would be very useful. You would of course have evidence of your experience in your portfolio of work that the bursars review outside of the interview, but having a few small samples during the interviews is also useful. While one can share these in a face-to-face interview setting, the seamlessness of already being on a digital platform and sharing digital files has better execution in a virtual interview.

Example 2

You are applying for a mid-weight Project Manager role at a company and currently you are working as a Project Coordinator. You can prepare graphs to show how the work you do, or innovations you have introduced have improved the efficiency, deadlines and economy on projects. If you are working in a product-based environment, you can show images of the end results of your projects for example new construction developments, FMCG products developed by your team, retail interior, books, etc. Putting all this information into a well designed presentation will show your capabilities as a project manager and your technological proficiencies.

Ask if the interview can be recorded and shared with you, so that you can review how you performed and make improvements where you pick up that you didn’t respond to the best of your ability. When we see ourselves on video (or hear ourselves in an audio recording), it is quite different to what we imagine we look and sound like. Seeing a playback of yourself in an interview will give you an objective view of how you look and sound to others. Based on that you can work on areas of improvement. For example using speech fillers too often (uhm, like, er) can be very distracting in a formal setting such as an interview. If you find that you were doing this frequently during your interview, but had not noticed it while you were talking, you can be mindful of that going forward so that you can stop yourself while your doing it. Reviewing yourself in this way will help for your future interviews, virtual or in person. Another benefit of having a recording of your interview is that you can examine how employers ask questions, what information they prioritise and whether there were questions they had to ask you in multiple ways to get the desired response. Note that not all companies will agree to this as they may discuss sensitive or confidential information during the interview.

Less stress in getting to and being at the interview

Getting to an interview generates a lot of stress, as does actually being in the room with a number of strangers asking you questions. All the tension of finding the interview location, carrying in files or documents, meeting a host of people before you actually get into the interview room, walking into an unfamiliar space to meet people who are there to judge your skills and competencies – all these non-core stresses are eliminated. In fact, you now have the benefit of being very familiar with the physical environment where you will be conducting your meeting. You will have the chance to set it up to your preferences so that you can be viewed in the best way. Additionally, you will not forget the names of your interviewers (due to nerves) because they will be identified on the screen.

Conclusion

Having access to your digital assets such as files, documents, reports, and presentations during your interview can help you come across as well prepared without your interviewers having to see all the resources you are referring to. You have the opportunity to customize mini-presentations for your interview, that are focused on how your skills and experience align to the requirements of the new role and presenting them in a more continuous way than would be possible in a face-to-face meeting at the company’s office. With a virtual interview, your role is closer to a co-creator rather than a guest.