Digital skills could help boost wages, according to Barclays

Developing digital skills could help plug the UK’s skills gap and boost wages, according to Barclays Digital Development Index 2017.

The index explored the digital skills and confidence levels of 6,000 adults and analysed 88,000 job adverts in the UK

Capabilities

The index showed the development of digitial skills could help boost earnings by £100,000 in ten years, with employers willing to pay up to £10,000 more a year for skills such as software design and programming.  

Developing digital capabilities could help bridge the UK’s skills gap. Skills such as word processing, social media management, and database spreadsheet are the most sought-after, with 63 per cent of jobs in the UK requiring them. However, just 57 per cent of the UK’s workforce have these skills.

The locations with the highest demand for digital skills are Northern Ireland and London, with 70 per cent and 66 per cent of job adverts searching for candidates with above basic digital skills as a minimum requirement.

London was also found to have the most digitally skilled workers, whie Northern Ireland, the North West and Scotland were identified as having the best digitally skilled workers outside of the capital.

Boost

Commenting on the benefits of digital skills, Barclays UK CEO Ashok Vaswani said that digital skills can give a crucial boost to household finances, and everybody deserves the chance to benefit from this.

He added that at a period when wage growth is so important to British families, we must act quickly to improve our home-grown digital skills if Britain is to stay at the forefront of the world’s digital economy after Brexit.