What is the Digital Capability for Workforce Skills Project
This project responds to a recommendation agreed by the Australian Industry and Skills Committee (AISC) from the report of the AISC’s Digital Transformation Expert Panel, The Learning Country: Digital Transformation Skills Strategy, delivered in early 2021.
One focus in the Expert Panel’s Strategy concentrates on ensuring that what’s delivered by Australia’s training system is future focussed, driven by industry and supports individual workers in their journey. This portal focuses on three critical initiatives proposed by the Expert Panel as outlined below.
Digital Capability Framework
The project will develop a Digital Capability Framework (Framework) to identify the range of skills essential for engagement with the broad digital transformation underway in the economy.
Information generated by the application of the Framework to training packages will be combined with earlier research on digital transformation in all industry sectors and provided to Industry Reference Committees (IRCs). This can then be used to support their industry expert review of training packages.
The Framework will enable a deeper knowledge of the relationship of training packages to the digital capabilities identified by the Framework. It will assist with providing a better understanding of how the skills relevant to digital transformation might be documented.
Strategic Review of Training Packages
In response to the Expert Panel’s proposal, IRCs will commence strategically reviewing their training packages through the lens of digital transformation in February 2022.
Online Companion Volume
This initiative will model a dynamic online companion volume to support the implementation of training packages. This model will show how relevant up-to-date industrial information, for use by trainers and learners, can be brought together in a way that responds to the speed of digital transformation.
Drawing on evidence, complementary initiatives and industry expertise, this project aims to:
How will the project work?
A broad-based steering committee is providing strategic guidance to the project to ensure consistency and alignment with other initiatives.
The project will leverage existing international resources and a range of initiatives already underway within Australia. The project will take as its starting point the European Commission’s Digital Capability Framework for Citizens (DigComp 2.1) and the Skills Framework for the Information Age.
AIS has sub-contracted CSIRO’s Data61 to support the development of a Digital Capability Framework suitable for the Australian VET context. The Framework will be validated by the IRCs responsible for the national training packages. The framework will be applied to existing training packages using the same kind of machine learning technology utilised by translation engines such as Google Translate or DeepL.