October 2025
The nation-wide conference on digital skills in adult education which took place at VHS Hannover on October 1st, 2025, gave us the opportunity to reflect again on the purpose and usefulness of the DigComp reference framework for digital skills of citizens. In two workshops with about 20 participants each we presented DigComp to our adult education colleagues from various other organisations, mostly from northern Germany, and there were two things that drew our attention:
1) Although there is principally very high interest amongst adult organisation managers for a structured approach to digital skills (how to classify them, how to categorize them, how to define them), we were left with the impression that most adult educators in our environment are not yet really familiar with DigComp. They know the term DigComp, and they have an idea about the origin and purpose of the framework, but they have not yet made the step to analyzing it more deeply, i.e. in terms of beeing aware that DigComp defines five "areas" of competences, with each of them consisting of 3-6 concrete competences, and that there are eight levels of proficiency a person can have in any of those competences. - Of course, our observation is biased, as it is based on the people attending our workshops, and one might assume that they were preferably people who came to get an introduction to DigComp.
2) Both amongst colleagues who already made in-depth attempts to use DigComp for re-organizing their way of providing adult education, and amongst colleagues who have not yet done this but were principall motivated to imagine using DigComp in their everday work, we saw scepticism about the applicability of the DigComp system especially when it comes to customer communication. This scepticism was triggered through our (VHS Hannover and VHS Vienna) presentation of concepts to make DigComp a tool for categorizing adult education programmes of all topics. Colleagues from other organisations expressed doubt if communicating things such as "In this course, you will make progress in Area 2, Competency 2.3, from Level 1 to Level 3" to customers (typically: citizens going to register for a course) would not rather disencourage them than attract them; even if information like this is presented in visual form (icons, badges, etc.) instead of text. We discussed about customers such as the proverbial elderly lady who wants to enrol for a language course or a cooking class and who only on reading terms such as "digital skills" or "use your smart phone", would feel uncomfortable or intimidated.
These were doubts we had already developed ourselves at VHS Hannover, in the wake of our onging attempts to include DigComp categorizations into the adult education planning process, and we found these doubts now shared by colleagues from other organisations.
Still, of course, we continue our experiment.
