Digital Literacy Skills Framework

What is the Digital Literacy Skills Framework?

Digital literacy refers to the skills and competencies needed to use digital technologies to achieve personal goals, enhance employability skills and support education and training.
Digital literacy sits alongside the core skills of Learning, Reading, Writing, Oral Communication and Numeracy. Joyce (2019) acknowledges the importance of digital literacy skills renaming the core foundation skills as Language, Literacy, Numeracy and Digital Literacy (LLND) skills. The inclusion of digital skills alongside the foundation skills of language, literacy and numeracy recognises that digital literacy has become increasingly critical for individuals’ participation in the workforce.
The Digital Literacy Skills Framework has been developed to support the Foundation Skills for your Future Commonwealth Government Program 2019. This program offers subsidised training that:

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  supports individuals to identify language, literacy, numeracy and digital (LLND) skill needs
  
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  enables eligible participants to access either accredited or non-accredited training. This can be directly through contracted Registered Training Organisations (RTOs) or through projects linking employers and RTOs to deliver contextualised LLND training to employees in a traditional vocational education and training (VET) setting or a workplace setting to support employed or recently unemployed individuals.
  

This Digital Literacy Skills Framework sits alongside the Australian Core Skills Framework (ACSF), © 2012 and the ACSF Pre Level 1 © 2017. Digital literacy has been added as the sixth core skill to this framework to reinforce the concept that digital literacy is part of an integral suite of core skills that are fundamental for individuals to be able to participate in society and work. The ACSF, including the Digital Literacy Skills Framework, facilitates a consistent national approach to the identification and development of the core skills in diverse personal, community, work and education and training contexts. It offers:

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  shared concepts and language for identifying describing and discussing core skills
  
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  a systematic approach to benchmarking, monitoring and reporting on core skills performance.
  

It is important to note that the ACSF (including the Digital Literacy Skills Framework) reflects contemporary use of English in Australia.