Digital Skills of Civil Servants: Assessing Readiness for Successful Interaction in e-society

Abstract: In spite of the exceptional role of digital skills in the development of e-society, there is an obvious lack of agreed tools to assess the level and deficit of those digital competencies, regarding the functional responsibilities for any professional tasks. In this research, the authors tested the most ubiquitous approach to measure digital skills development, which is justified by EU experts, in DigComp 2.1. Our analysis is performed using the survey of civil servants, as a group of frontline professionals, responsible for digital society development, particularly for, e-government development. Our representative survey covered 428 civil servants in Ukraine. This group was chosen considering the high impact of e-government development on economic results (GDP and global competitiveness index), which is defined by authors with correlation coefficients of 0.649 and 0.872 respectively, in the EU. At the same time, we found that the digital skills of civil servants in Ukraine cannot be considered as well-developed, since their average best level, is equal to 6 points on an 8-point scale. The most obvious lack of digital skills, is a character for the field of competencies “digital content creation”. In addition, obstacles in public servants’ digital skills development are connected with a low level of population’s readiness to digital services and other digital tools usage. These results can be considered not only in the light of inappropriate digital competencies development in the public administration sphere but also with the methodological gaps in digital competencies measurement. Particularly, in our research, we proved that the framework for digital skills assessment should be developed using a flexible approach (optional skills of certain levels of professional orientation and complexity), but at the same time, functional responsibilities for professional tasks within the qualification characteristics of certain positions should be considered.