Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

To thrive in today’s innovation-driven economy, workers need a different mix of skills than in the past. In addition to foundational skills like literacy and numeracy, they need competencies like collaboration, creativity and problem-solving, and character qualities like persistence, curiosity and initiative.

Changes in the labour market have heightened the need for all individuals, and not just a few, to have these skills. In countries around the world, economies run on creativity, innovation and collaboration. Skilled jobs are more and more centred on solving unstructured problems and effectively analysing information. In addition, technology is increasingly substituting for manual labour and being infused into most aspects of life and work. Over the past 50 years, the US economy, as just one of many developed-world examples, has witnessed a steady decline in jobs that involve routine manual and cognitive skills, while experiencing a corresponding increase in jobs that require non-routine analytical and interpersonal skills (see Exhibit 1). Many forces have contributed to these trends, including the accelerating automation and digitization of routine work.