RADIO Webinar: Onderzoek professionele digitale skills

RADIO Webinar: Onderzoek professionele digitale skills. Spreker: Alex Ingrams, Leiden University. Host en co-host: Lykle de Vries en Marie Louise Borsje.

LYKLE DE VRIES: Welkom bij dit webinar over professionele digitale vaardigheden. We gaan het in het Engels doen, omdat onze gast Engelstalig is en dan veel beter uit z'n woorden komt. So right now, we'll switch to English. This webinar is part of the fourth Month of Digital Fitness that RADIO is proud to partner with. And since digital fitness is all about digital skills and being effective using your digital equipment in a way that frees up time, we were quite surprised to find that there is not a lot known about how professionals go about using their digital tools. What are the digital skills that a professional worker, a knowledge worker or an office worker needs? We didn't find many things about it. Then we came across Alex, who is right now researching just that. So we're very happy to have you here, Alex. Having said that, I'd like to give you the floor.

ALEX INGRAMS: Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here. I did also find it was remarkably fortuitous that Marie Louise and Lykle got in touch with me right at the time that we're in the middle of doing some nationwide research in the Netherlands on digital skills, focusing on the public sector. So it's my pleasure to present some very early results from our research to stimulate a broader discussion around what digital skills are, why they're important and what types of impacts they might have in public organisations. So I'll dive right in with my presentation. I'll start with a brief introduction about myself as well. I'm at the Institute of Public Administration at Leiden University. And I'm a teacher focused on management and policy of digital technology in public organisations. One of the main roles I have is that I coordinate a specialisation in our Bestuurskunde bachelor, called Digitalisation, Governance and Society. The main goal of this specialisation is to help students to become bridge-makers between information science and public governance. In a nutshell, that's what we try and do. It's from the experience of being a teacher that I really started thinking about these questions of what types of skills we want to give our students and to think about that in a more scientific way.

In my research, I focus on very similar areas to what I teach, which helps the dialogue between teaching and research in a very good way. To give you some examples of some things I research, some research questions I ask are: how can data science help transparency in decision-making? How do public managers consider public values in adoption of algorithmic systems? And why do some public organisations use artificial intelligence tools, while others do not? Just to give you a taste of some of the things I spend my time thinking about. As I said, some of the background to this story springs directly from the teaching we do in the Instituut Bestuurskunde at Leiden University. We set up one of the first bachelor specialisations that attempted to marry the growth and the importance of data science in public sector organisations with the more core focuses of public administration on areas such as public policy making and governance. And to give students that are moving into their careers in the public sector, but also in the private sector or in non-profit organisations, the skills of having feet in both worlds. Not to be data science specialists, but to understand how the system works, know what's important about them and to think critically about them, so they can move into more applied types of public sector positions.

What we found in our research when we started looking at the importance of digital skills in public organisations, is that there are a host of positive things that are associated with that. So there's research showing that employees who have high levels of digital skills for example tend to be more engaged in work innovativeness. [Erhan, Uzunbacak and Aydin, 2022.] So they tend to seek risky and new ways of doing things often involving technology. In many ways, it's a different mindset that you take if you're an employee that's more confident and adept in bringing different types of technologies to bear in your daily work. There's also evidence of spillover effects on other areas of work. [Olivanti and Gastaldi, 2024.] For example, being competent in uses of technology can enhance things like job satisfaction, or it can encourage you to engage in more helping behaviours with your other colleagues. So there are those sorts of spillover effects on other areas. There's evidence that it can boost professional reputation. [Kokkodis, 2021.] There's a way that mastering technology skills is seen a really good currency and a very positive thing to bring to work teams that improves your professional reputation. It also can be a tool for boosting employee engagement. [Boccoli, Gastaldi and Coros, 2024.] This particular study cited here was one that was looking at remote working during the pandemic and showed how using these new tools with remote working... The success of those really depended on how it was implemented by public managers, and how they could finetune those to existing work routines and work practices that could make it more effective in really engaging employees during a difficult and challenging time for many.

So with all these you might say that I've cherry-picked some of these positive aspects of technology. You might also say that it's perhaps very obvious things that you could've guessed without empirical research being done on them. As we know, there are also downsides to technology in organisations. You may have heard things such as the digital divide, for example, which is when some individuals are left behind in society, but that concept could also apply to organisations. And also some of the negative aspects of technology in organisations. Surveillance, leaking of private data, cybersecurity vulnerabilities. There are downsides to all of those which we wanted to be very aware of. Another problem that we wanted to look at here, coming from the point of view as teachers, and not just researchers, is: for someone as myself who's running a teaching programme that aims to address some of these problems, it's one thing to say that technology is important and that we need more of it. But how exactly? What skills do we want to give to students at universities who are thinking of going into the public sector? Do we need to give them a really hands-on understanding of data science or can we just teach them enough so they have what they need to be critical of the use of data science? Given that technologies are constantly evolving, can we really give them detailed knowledge about technology or do we just introduce them to a broader set of technology management skills that they can then finetune when they move into a position in an organisation? In general, shouldn't most of these skills be taught in the workplace? Do we really need to give them to students when they're at university? A lot of these types of questions were things we were playing with and that we wanted to investigate with some more research.

We got together a team of some of the researchers across the Netherlands in different universities that have experience of working on these areas. We wanted to make this a big collaborative effort between many universities. So we work together in a collaboration with Shirley Kempeneer from Tilburg University, Bram Kleivink, who's also at Leiden University, Alexander van Deursen and Ester van Laar at the University of Twente and Henrico van Roekel, who's at Utrecht University. And we're funded by the Stichting Competens, which runs the IT Skills fund in the Netherlands, as well as funded by our own Institute.

We undertook some research. We're currently running a survey. As I speak, the responses are coming in. So I'm only able to report on some aspects of the survey so far, but it can give you some good insights into who these survey respondents are. I should mention that we're not aiming to gain a nationally representative sample of public managers. We simply would not be able to do that type of systematic selection across a whole range of national public organisations. Our goal is to find a sample of diverse individuals from different backgrounds working in different levels of government that would provide enough of a sample for us to investigate some of these questions and explore what digital skills mean to those public managers. I should add that by public managers we mean individuals in public organisations who have some responsibility for leading other members of a team. Whether that's a very small team, to a very large type of team in a type of directorship role. We have a range of different age groups. As you might expect, most of them falling in the middle age range. A few are in the younger and the older end of the distribution. Roughly half-and-half male and female. And quite a range of different educational backgrounds. And also quite a mix of different levels of government within the Netherlands. The vast majority at Rijksoverheid and gemeenten. A smaller number from the provinces. A very small number, as you might expect, from the Water Authorities. And then also a decent number from within 'gemeenschappelijke regelingen' or of 'samenwerkingsorganen'.

When we approached our survey, to step back for a moment and think, we want to find out from public managers what types of digital skills they have which are important and how those might influence the work they do. Can I ask people in the room at this point if you would foresee any particular challenges that we might encounter if we're going to ask individuals about their digital skills. Feel free to chime in if you'd like to, or enter something in the chat. What types of challenges might you foresee if we're asking individuals about their digital skills levels?

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LYKLE: We're getting responses in two different channels. Ellen adds: bias to the Q&A.

ALEX: Bias, yeah.

LYKLE: Nienke mentions mental challenges. 'A higher evaluation in self-report than actual skills when performed in practice' by Carlijn. We'd like to think higher of ourselves, most of the time.

ALEX: Many of you are spot-on. You're all striking upon exactly the type of problems we were encountering. We adopted an innovative tool from existing survey research to try and tackle this problem. I'm interested to see what you think about this. We've employed something called 'the Bayesian Truth Serum'. Let me explain what BTS is. What we do, is for each question we ask a public manager about digital skills is that we divide that question into three parts. We ask them, firstly, to think about their colleagues and for them to estimate the percentage of their direct colleagues that they think would lack a specific digital skill, the percentage of their direct colleagues who they think would be honest about lacking this digital skill, and finally, in the third part, we ask them about themselves whether they lack this skill. The BTS approach, Bayesian Truth Serum approach, has been used in similar settings to try and overcome problems of self-reporting bias. What it essentially does, is that it provides a way of adjusting self-reported scores to come up with something that is likely more approximate to what the case really is. This approach has been shown in many settings to come up with more reliable estimates as opposed to purely relying on self-reports. What I'd like to do, is ask you to try this out yourselves. There's a couple of questions here. [QR code appears on screen.] If you want to try this out, please go to the form. This is entirely anonymous. There is no data collected about you. If you'd like to go to the questions and look at them. It's purely to give you a clearer, more concrete idea of how this works in practice. I'll give you a couple of minutes to take a look at that.

LYKLE: In the meantime, Alex, Ellen also asks: how do you define digital skills? Or will you be talking on that later?

ALEX: An absolutely vital question. I'm about to get into that into more detail, just after this step.

LYKLE: The way the participants are now going to the questions, having to scan the QR code, is that the same way that you rolled out your survey?

ALEX: Another very good question. We did not use it that way, no. You'll see that it's very similar to how we set it up. It was on a different platform. We used a well-known research platform called Qualtrics. Essentially, we'll give you an accurate idea of what the respondents would have received too.

LYKLE: Do you see any results come in?

ALEX: Let's have a look.

(SILENCE)

LYKLE: There we go.

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ALEX: Okay.

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The first part is: estimate the percentage of colleagues in your team who lack the following skills. I've just provided two of the skills items that we use in our research: how to choose the best keywords for online searches. and how to report negative content related to you or a group you belong to. As I can see from this result, the red is on the negative side, sort of the lower end of the predictions. This is asking: how many would lack it? For these ones, it's suggested that you would say: most of your colleagues would know how to do this. Estimate the percentage of colleagues who'd honestly say they lack this skill. And again, quite similar types of rates. You have quite a positive... Actually, no. On this one, it's quite the opposite. You'd say in many cases... It looks like a majority of people would say that less than 50 per cent would be honest about this. It says a lot about how we think about self-reporting on digital skills topics. And then whether you yourself know this, and it's yes or no. That's essentially how this works. There's a form that allows you to create a score that adjusts for these types of self-reporting bias. I'm curious to hear what you think about this approach to testing knowledge about people's digital skills.

LYKLE: Feel free to add your reaction in the comments. I had to chuckle because of the term, Bayesian Truth Serum. But I think it makes sense. Then again, you mentioned it as well, you could easily run into the bias we have towards our colleagues and coworkers by maybe feeling that we can do it better ourselves than they can. This is an interesting one: how do you deal with somebody unskilled but who is not aware of being unskilled?

ALEX: That is a tricky question. You'd hope that part of the BTS trick is having at least an idea, even if it isn't entirely accurate, of your colleagues. So even if you think you have this skill in very high amounts yourself, adjusting for how you think whether other colleagues might have it and whether you think what your idea is of people's general levels of honesty might factor into how you would really sit in your levels of having that particular skill. We ran a pilot on this and I haven't seen this coming up yet in people's comments, but one thing that had come up for us is the degree to which managers would realistically know always what level of skill their colleagues have. Because you don't necessarily work that closely with your colleagues all the time and many of these types of digital skills are things that are rather hidden. You do them as part of your work projects, just with you working on your desktop. Whether managers really would have that detailed knowledge of what their colleagues can and cannot do... The response I always give to that is that the effectiveness of this measure doesn't necessarily require that you have very detailed knowledge of what your colleagues do. It's enough that you have an estimate of what you'd expect others to have. That can provide a point of adjustment to your own self-report of whether or not you master that skill. Anyway, thanks for trying that out. I hope that's been an eye-opening or thought-provoking way of thinking about how you can get an understanding of people's digital skills level.

To get on to the other part of the question I received earlier, which is: how do we define digital skills? We did a lot of reviewing of existing literature. There have been many different digital skills scales developed over the years. Both in studying the public sector and in studying the private sector. What we tried to do, was amalgamate the knowledge from those and to find a good balance of existing skills and to match those well to skills that would work in the public sector when looking at managers. What we found, was that there are four main domains of digital skills. The first is organisation and project management related skills. [Hunnius et al., 2015; Roman et al., 2019; Taylor Smith et al., 2019; Van Laar et al., 2020.] These relate to how you select tools for research, storage and tracking of tasks. Essentially sort of the background skills, how you browse securely, the approach that you use to passwords, and so forth. All those technical types of tools that you need in order to use data and information and to keep track of a project.

That was one area. The other area is information skills and problem solving. [Ferrari, 2012; Van Laar et al., 2020.] This is how to source, form opinions towards and to apply data. This is your information management skills. Whether you find the information you look at credible and how you can decide whether it's credible. Those types of information skills.

Thirdly, communication, interpersonal and collaboration skills. [Ferrari, 2012; Helsper and Eynon, 2013; Roman et al., 2019; Taylor Smith et al., 2019; Van Laar et al., 2020.] This is about sharing information and the more emotive and interpersonal aspects of how you use digital tools as the picture here would suggest. Use of emoticons is one part of this. And how you know what's appropriate and secure in sharing information during your work.

Finally, creativity skills. [Ferrari, 2012; Helsper and Eynon, 2013; Van Laar et al., 2020.] This is all about the different platforms you can use to manipulate images, videos, powerpoints. We all run into those types of tricky challenges around how to manipulate images and working with different types of software that all seem to work differently. That seems to be another important area of skills.

One final thing to point out here is that there was an overarching finding that we found when looking at existing skills on the sociotechnical and fusion skills. [Hunnius et al., 2015.] There's a strong sense in literature that's called sociotechnical strengths. A concept you may have heard before that refers to the way that we are once developing technical skills, but also applying them within social and organisational settings. Using them effectively is about combining the technical and the social. That was a strong theme that was running through the research we looked at. We ended up using this pre-existing measurement tool developed by Helsper and colleagues quite recently, which broadly followed this fourfold, these four dimensions of digital skills. These list a few examples of types of questions we had. With technical and operational: how do you secure a device? How do you store photos, et cetera? Information navigation: how to use advanced search features in search engines? How to check if information you find is accurate? Communication and interaction: knowing what images and information of yours you can share online. Knowing when it's appropriate or not appropriate to use emoticons. Content creation and production: how to edit existing images? Or, for example, if you're posting something on a public website, how to create it in such a way and adjust the settings so that you know people can see what you see and those types of problems that we often come up against. Finally, one interesting thing that Helsper had added, because this was quite recently, is programming languages. We hesitated somewhat on this one, because we weren't sure if programming was really a relevant skill in general for public managers. But when we ran our pilots a few weeks ago, we found that it did play... It was relatively unimportant compared to other areas, but it was still one that was considered important to a degree. So we decided to keep and investigate this area of programming skills as well.

As I said, we do have... We're still collecting responses, so we don't have a great deal that I can report on at the moment in terms of insights. But I can give you a flavour of the types of things that we're looking at and the types of things that already seem to be coming through to an extent. This shows by education level the digital skills scores for those five dimensions of digital skills. From the left to the right, you have the tech-related things, which are sort of the background tasks that you do to manage a project. Information, about whether you find information reliable and how you source information and use it in your work. Communication. Content, sort of the creative aspect. And finally, the programming one. You don't see so far a great deal of differences between different levels of education. I think you wouldn't necessarily expect to see a great difference there if we're talking about individuals who are already in managerial levels within public organisations. What is very evident here is the relatively low performance of programming skills. As we expected. This one, we didn't expect to be very important to public managers.

MARIE LOUISE BORSJE: Maybe it's important, but there are no facilities to do it in a digital way.

ALEX: Yes, I think you're absolutely right. I think it's not necessarily the importance per se, but the salience at the moment. I think this is a very interesting one to think about for myself and our colleagues when we're already developing learning material for undergraduates and thinking about how they can understand algorithmic systems, the use of data in algorithmic systems, the types of concepts that are used in algorithms and how to be critical of them.

MARIE LOUISE: Sometimes I meet young people who would love to have facilities for programming, but they are not available. And maybe it's also the wish for programming. Not only 'do you have the skills?', but 'do you wish to do it?'

ALEX: Yeah.

MARIE LOUISE: Because here it shows there is not... Er is niet echt een programma beschikbaar. Ik zie wel mensen die omwegen gebruiken, illegale programma's, om hetzelfde te bereiken, dus of dit nou is omdat ze het niet kunnen of omdat ze het niet willen? Hoe belangrijk is dat?

ALEX: I actually had prepared some questions on programming which I'll give everyone a chance to look at. Because I'd love to discuss that one more. We found the same thing when looking at digital skills scores by age. There's somewhat a stereotype when looking at digital skills that comes anecdotally from our experience of adaptation to technology change, that older people are less strong in digital skills, but we don't really find so far a great deal of evidence for that. Except perhaps... Again, it's very difficult to draw conclusions from this, except for the sort of retirement age. I should add there's only six individuals in that age category here, so it's virtually impossible to interpret this. But the programming aspect is again quite low here. I wondered what you think about this. [QR code appears on screen.] I've prepared one very short, simple question on this. I'd like to hear your views on that. If you could go to this short question... I'll give everyone a minute, because it's a very short question, and then I'd be interested in opening up that question for any other comments from the audience.

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MARIE LOUISE: Maybe I had a wrong impression of 'programming'. Programming means coding, but also means planning.

ALEX: Coding, and... ?

MARIE LOUISE: Planning a project. That's also a form of programming.

ALEX: Yes, but it's not that type.

MARIE LOUISE: Okay, it's coding?

ALEX: It's coding, yeah. I'm very glad you asked.

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LYKLE: Do you come across any misinterpretations that are similar to what Marie Louise just said, where maybe an older-age group has learned to write source code in a more 'traditional' way compared to younger generations doing it on their mobile device in a different setting, and maybe not perceiving that similarly?

ALEX: Yeah, that's a really good point. We haven't picked that up in any of the responses we've had so far. But I think that's a very important area to investigate, which also applies to other aspects of technology. When you're thinking about something like algorithms as well, which today is often closely associated with self-learning algorithms and artificial intelligence, whereas in fact algorithms in terms of developing decision-making rules based on inputs is also something that you may have been doing for much longer than could be understood in a different way. I think those types of puzzles are the ones we're certainly very interested in getting to the bottom of.

LYKLE: Okay. So, how are the results?

ALEX: Let's see. Here we are. The question I put to you was: are computer programming skills an important skill for public managers? And the options I gave you... I tried to not make it black or white, and give you some room for different possibilities while keeping it simple. So 'yes, in all respects'. That's for those of you who are sure that it can and should be important. 'No, not at all'. There are no people who said that. Most of you said: 'A good understanding of the principles is enough' or 'It really depends on the type of public manager'. That's very interesting to hear. Would anyone like to either expand on their response given that I didn't really give much room for nuance here? You might want to explain your viewpoint further or any other thoughts that you have about the importance of computer programming for public managers.

LYKLE: One conversation that is happening in the chat, is where people reflect on: I might be older, but I've gone through the steps of gradually learning how to work with a pc and everything that comes with it. Another aspect of the conversation is: you might be older, so you have life skills which younger people don't have in the same amounts at that time. Parts of it is also about how bigger organisations generally treat software upgrades, et cetera. They're basically shot into the organisation without much support a lot of the times. So that could, no matter your age, make it difficult. Alan says: A generalist profile is becoming more important according to research. That would include programming understanding then, I guess.

ALEX: Yeah. Yeah. That's good to hear. Those very much resonate with what we've found so far and the approach that we've tried to take in developing undergraduate programmes in digital skills. So it's... We work closely with the Leiden University Institute of Advances Computer Science who provide the data science, some basic training in data science. We collaborate with public organisations like CBS who can provide some synthetic data sets or cases that are very relevant to public sector questions about public service delivery or public policy formation. And then ask students to complete very basic computations and to think critically about the data and the decisions that they're making, with the idea that if they find themselves in a situation in the workplace where they're handed a report which might rely on some very technical analysis, that they cannot ask the right questions. That's the type of skill that we think is a really important part of this sort of generalist package of skills that we would like them to have. Yeah. Okay, good. Thank you very much for your reflections on that.

I have just one more slide before I'll open up for any final questions. Sorry, I have one more quiz question, and then we can open up some final questions. But this aspect is the aspect of public values. We asked respondents to reflect on the problem of digital skills shortages where those occur in their organisation. And we asked them to consider whether there are public values impacts of such shortages. And the public values theory is one that argues, if you like, that the public sector has as its goal, not like the private sector to deliver profits or consumer satisfaction or shareholder dividends. Though there are similar functions that the public sector plays, of course, but that it has a broader set of goals, often referred to as public values. One set of important public values could be this one you see on the screen. Things like competitiveness, innovation, accountability, fairness, collaboration, transparency, trustworthiness and professionalism. We asked respondents whether they think shortages could have a negative impact on these areas. You see 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, where 0 is no impact at all and 4 is a very big impact. What you can see so far from our results, and I don't really expect that this would change a great deal, but what you see is that these are all getting half-scores of around 2, suggesting that there's a somewhat important impact of digital skills shortages on public values impacts. What this suggests to me, is that perhaps for public managers the causal connection between digital skills and public values is complex. It's not easy to say: There's a direct impact that can be a very powerful impact. In some amorphous way, digital skills capacities would ultimately have an influence on whether an organisation succeeds in these things, that perhaps it's complex. That's one way you could look at these results so far. Again, I would love to hear what you think on this one. This is the last quiz question. [QR code appears on screen.]9 It's another quick one. If you'd like to try that. Then we'll open up for some general questions.

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MARIE LOUISE: I see there are a lot of HR professionals in this webinar. So maybe we can also, later on, talk about how to learn these skills.

ALEX: Yeah.

MARIE LOUISE: But first the question.

ALEX: Very good. That sounds good.

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Do digital skills levels influence an organisation's ability to promote public values? 'Yes, definitely' and 'Yes, to a certain degree'. So all in the positive sphere, which is good to see. Good. I think Marie Louise's point is a really good one. To start fielding some broader questions, perhaps related to how we can develop and apply these skills in a practical way. I'd also be very interested in hearing about your views on this, so that I can consider those as a teacher and how we think about how we give these skills to students and the extent to which we prepare them for their careers. What can we teach in the classroom? What needs to be taught and learnt in a professional setting? Formal training, informal training, and so forth. I think those are all different considerations that we can give to this.

[Thank you for listening. Do you have further questions?]

LYKLE: Just to repeat, I think it's too early for you now to already start giving out advice based on these results, right?

ALEX: That's right.

LYKLE: This is something that was also asked in the chat, but you'll be doing this research for a bit longer before you can actually sit down and take a look at what it all means for us.

ALEX: Yes, I think it will take a few more weeks to collect the data and analyse what we have. But then, shortly after that, we'll be able to publish some findings that we can share.

LYKLE: And we'll try to make sure that RADIO also shares those results. But in the meantime there's two questions. The first one I think... They're now in the Q&A section, so maybe that's a good place to add your question and take a look at the other questions that are asked. And if you agree with the question, upvote it. That gives us a good indication of the most urgent one to answer. I'm going to take the one from Carlijn. Can you tell me some of the key insights you find overall in the digital skills of managers and what popped out for you or what did you not expect?

ALEX: Yeah, it's a really good question. I hope we can provide something that will be really insightful and helpful. At the moment, it's really too early to say anything very concrete about what we found. One thing that we did see some signs of when we looked at the pilot study, and this is an area that I haven't been able to address yet, is some impacts of digital skill levels on things like levels of satisfaction or self-efficacy, for example. It will be interesting to see whether and why there are correlations between digital skills levels and those types of impacts, like job satisfaction and self-efficacy. That's one that we think is interesting to look out for. One area that we also want to examine is the concept of gaps in organisations. We've developed a framework for understanding what gaps really mean in public organisations. There are... You can have typical digital divide types of gaps. Age groups, education levels, and so forth. Do those matter as HR specialists and managers? To what extent can you address digital divides between education levels or different age groups? Or the extent to which digital skills result directly from things like training or having a digital strategy in your organisation. That's another one that we have. We ask people: how much training do you get and does your organisation have a digital strategy? To what extent does that help with the development of digital skills? I just don't have any results right now on those, but that's just to give you an idea of some interesting things we could find.

LYKLE: You might be able to answer it later on. Let's see. There's not too many upvotes. There was a suggestion in the chat, though. Junior colleagues to teach senior colleagues about how the stuff works. But then it comes down to the same thing, because it could work in both ways, only if you made an effort to do it and made it an obvious question to ask. I'm not sure if your research will cover that, but there's a lot of assumptions in the workplace as well about: It's supposed to be working like this apparently. I'll try and manage. Whereas these are also tools you can learn and you can increase your abilities in. Okay. Another one. What role does a manager have on the digital skills for the employees? And how do their own digital skills impact that of their employees? Is there such a thing as 'het goede voorbeeld geven'?

ALEX: Yes, I think this is a really good question. The research we've looked at so far, and we won't directly answer these questions in our research, but from the previous research we've looked at is that there's this concept of e-leadership. This looks at the extent to which managers pass on their knowledge of digital skills. That's partially dependent on the aspect of their own digital skills having an important role, but even more important than that is the component of e-leadership, that is about fashioning the connection between individual skills and their tasks. So how you give those a meaning. And through a project management process, you're able to match individuals to the right skills and create a clear pathway for what types of skills you need and why and when, and what types of impacts those would have. I think that requires managers to be, and this is more difficult than it sounds, to be clear and explicit about the role of digital skills, and to consider it a real and concrete aspect of managing people's professional development and their work within teams. It can be a difficult area to address. It's sensitive. It's also complex, legally complex. What tool can we use, what can't we use? I think the first step that research shows we can focus on is making those choices explicit and provide an easy to understand narrative about how skills can be used in a setting.

MARIE LOUISE: It's already very valuable if you say: these are the group of skills that you need. Then, people can decide for themselves what they have to do to get better at those skills.

ALEX: Yes.

MARIE LOUISE: Recognising is the start. Starting with 'you need to know Microsoft Office' is not the way. It's about processing information. With your research, you make groups of skills. Processing information, social skills. That's also very valuable.

ALEX: Yes, I 100 percent agree. I think this concept of sociotechnical always comes back here. It's not just about challenging employees to be more technically advanced. It's about providing a way of flourishing within their existing professional skill sets, working within an organisation and finding ways that they can apply what they do know already and develop further within that setting.

LYKLE: Thank you. I’m looking at some of the other questions, but I'm also looking at the clock. So it's going to be difficult for me to choose. I do think that the chat has been a very lively setting for some of the participants to share experiences already. One of the topics that's going on is: shouldn't digital skills, whatever they may be, be part of the formal cycle of hiring people, evaluating people, training people? My personal opinion would be: yes, definitely. I'm hoping that your research will help us better explain why that is and what skills should be there and how to go about it. You mentioned that you have another couple of weeks to go before you can start and sit down with the results. What will happen after when you publish your results? What are your expectations or your plans?

ALEX: I think you summed up the importance of the research very well. For the next step, what we'll do is collect and analyse the results. We will present at a couple of academic conferences to get feedback there as well from our academic colleagues. We work closely with several different public agencies. RADIO is one of them. We want to discuss those results with RADIO and some of our other partner organisations we work with, who are focused on this area of developing digital skills in the public sector. And find useful ways to apply them. We don't want this just to be some scientific results that go to academics and we don't learn from them more broadly. We hope we'll be able to do that. We'll certainly try and keep everyone in the loop.

LYKLE: That means that we as RADIO will also keep all of you participants in the loop as much as we can. That concludes our webinar for this moment. Thank you so much, Alex, for joining us and taking the time to talk us through all of it. Let's hope that some of the answers that you gathered might help as well. This webinar is part of the Dutch Month of Digital Fitness, which will still be going for the rest of the week, so do look up the website maandvandedigitalefitheid.nl to see if there's anything else that you want to take part in. We recorded this webinar and intend to share it later on. This will take about a week probably. And we'll give you all an update on that. Again, Alex and Marie Louise, thank you so much for joining is. And all participants, thank you for actively taking part in this webinar. Have a nice day.

ALEX: My pleasure. Goodbye everyone.