‘Digitalized’ Competences. A Crucial Challenge beyond Digital Competences

Abstract

Today’s societies are experiencing a digitalization that is transforming organizations and jobs. Scholars, practitioners, and policy makers tend to focus on digital competences as a way to adapt the general population and workers to the technological revolution, enhance competitiveness and employability, and reduce social exclusion. It is important to develop “digital competences”, but we propose that this strategy only provides a partial view of the necessary capabilities. To achieve a more complete picture, “digitalized competences” should also be considered, that is, non-digital competences that are transformed through the intervention of digital technologies. Increasingly, jobs in which purely digital skills are not core elements change dramatically when they incorporate digital objects and processes. This change forces workers and professionals to perform traditional tasks in a very different way. It is likely that the shift from non-digital to digitalized competences involves a more pervasive transformation for organizations, jobs, and workers than pure digital competences. With this in mind, this article has two main objectives. First, we provide a definition of digitalized competences, linked to job transformation. Second, we use a typology of competences (professional, core cognitive, transversal, and leadership) and some cases to illustrate this change.