Designing digital skills training for learners who've been left behind
Most digital literacy content is written by and for people who are already comfortable with technology. That's exactly the group least likely to need it.
A huge amount of digital skills training material assumes a starting point that a specific group of learners has never had: a household with a working laptop, a parent who used email for work, a first job that required a login. For someone job-hunting after years out of the workforce, or a young person in a region with patchy connectivity and no formal digital education, that same content can feel like it was written in a foreign language.
Designing for these learners isn't about simplifying — it's about starting from a genuinely different place: naming things without assuming prior vocabulary, building confidence before speed, and treating a moment of not-knowing as normal rather than embarrassing.
In our own work, the audiences this matters most for are job seekers re-entering the workforce, NEET youth (not in education, employment or training), and learners in under-resourced regions where digital access itself is inconsistent. Accessible design here isn't a nice-to-have layered on top — it's the difference between a programme that reaches them and one that quietly excludes them by assuming too much.