Determinants of digital skills in the socio-educational sector in Germany

Abstract

Digital Skills are highly required for development of economies and individuals. Germany lacks digital skills to drive the digital transformation of its economy. Various educational institutions offer skill trainings to the population also for digital skills. But what if their employees them-selves need to expand their skills? The master thesis is about digital skills among employees from the Bildungsgenossenschaft Südniedersachsen eG (BIGS), a cooperative of 29 educational providers in Southern Lower Saxony, Germany. First, digital skills are defined in line with current research, followed by a systematic literature review giving an overview on the research of digital skills. The main part of the thesis is about a survey, which was conducted to measure digital skills and their drivers among 88 employees of the BIGS cooperative. In contrast to former studies on digital skills, it was decided to take labour-related dynamic variables into account in the regression analysis. Finally, the research question whether working hours have a positive impact on digital skills can be answered with yes and working less than 30 % in an office was found to have a strong nega-tive influence on digital problem-solving skills. The effect of working experience is not so straight forward. More than 30 years of working experience negatively influence digital skills, whereas less than ten years have an increasingly positive impact. The results suggest that working conditions have to be considered in (on-the-job-) training to increase digital skills among employees from the German socio-educational industry, whereas demographic, mi-croeconomic and educational aspects turned out to be less important.