How does your company stack up against the Basic Digital Skills Framework? The framework is an updated version of the Basic Online Skills Framework. It sets out the skills individuals and companies need to get on in today’s digital world. This includes the things we do in everyday life, plus tasks carried out in the workplace. There are five Skill areas:

• Managing Information
• Communicating
• Transacting
• Problem solving
• Creating

It’s estimated that around 11.5 million adults in the UK don’t have basic digital skills. In business, digital skills can determine a company’s competitive edge. Lack of skill in any of the five key segments creates risk, and can even lead to business failure.

Innovation and upgrading skills are one side of the coin. Having the tools to stay competitive is the other.

Microsoft Office 365 provides companies and users with a constantly innovating set of business tools. They make keeping up with the skills as determined by the Digital Skills Framework easier. In each of the five areas of digital skills, Microsoft Office 365 has tools and applications that are constantly innovating.

Used together, Office 365 lets employees save time and work more efficiently. Business leaders, in turn, can discover new ways to innovate and bring products to market.

Here’s how Office 365 products helps business meet the requirements of the Basic Digital Skills Framework:

Managing Information

Office 365 can make smart work of compliance issues, manage online risks, and make it easier for staff to find, share and use information efficiently.

Communicating

Whether internal between staff members or communications with external customers or suppliers, Office 365 provides a joined-up environment where everything works together. From telephony to information sharing via SharePoint, communication works effectively.

Transacting

Office 365 offers a multitude of tools for all types of business transacting, from raising an invoice to protection from scams and frauds in email. Confidence in online security is one of the areas where Yorkshire could do better. The national average is 33% for people who feel they have the digital skills necessary to stay safe from online threats, while in Yorkshire only 25% are confident. You can download the stats for Yorkshire here.

Problem solving

Staying on top of information and the way it’s used in a business can be overwhelming. Microsoft products such as Delve use machine learning and the Office Graph to find answers to many problems via relevant information by showing personally tailored search results.

Creating

Innovation and creation walk hand in hand with Office 365. With just the core productivity applications such as Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Word, you can create just about anything you need. It could be social media content or resources for staff training or customer engagement.

Office 365 encourages the development of skills needed for effective business operation. Seamless connections between devices with cloud storage in OneDrive for Business, makes work accessible from anywhere.

Office 365 applications go far deeper, of course, than the basics set out in the skills framework. But having a solid foundation on which to build and develop even greater skills puts companies on the leading edge.

As mentioned, Yorkshire as a whole does quite well in some areas of the digital skills framework. But there are also areas where our county could do better.

Business leaders who recognise the importance of expansion and growth are over 40% more likely to invest in digital services – not only the equipment or software, but also the skills to use them.

If you’d like to learn more about how Office 365 could benefit your business and increase your staff skill levels, please get in touch.

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