5 moves that make digital skills training stick
Practical guide
5 moves that make digital skills training stick
Evidence-backed actions to turn your digital upskilling investment into real engagement and results.
Digital skills matter, but training alone doesn’t guarantee results. Many organisations struggle with low engagement and limited impact.
Drawing on FutureDotNow’s Learning That Clicks research, here are five practical ways to make digital skills training stick.
The moves
Build confidence, not just course completion.
Training sticks when it is social, relevant, easy to access, timed around real change, and measured by the value it creates. Use these five moves as a practical checklist for your next digital upskilling sprint.
Move 1: Train digital champions, not just employees
The Evidence
Peer mentoring is one of the most effective ways to build digital skills, reduce anxiety, and sustain motivation. People learn digital skills best from colleagues they trust, not from e-learning modules alone.
In Practice
Dorset Council appointed over 250 digital learning champions and combined this with gamification. The result was £222,000 in productivity and time savings in a single year.
Your First Step
Identify 5–10 digitally confident employees across different teams. Ask each person to help one colleague per week with a digital task they find frustrating. No formal training required, just permission and recognition.
Move 2: Make it about the job outcome, not digital skills
The Evidence
Training framed around tools, such as “Learn OneNote”, consistently underperforms training framed around job outcomes, such as “Spend less time on admin”. For some workers, even the word “digital” can trigger anxiety.
In Practice
Cornwall Council discovered staff were avoiding training simply because it was labelled as digital. When they rebranded it around job-specific inefficiencies, participation rose from near zero to 25% of the workforce.
Your First Step
Audit your current training offer. Rename anything that leads with a tool name or the word “digital”. Reframe around the work problem it solves: getting paid faster, keeping customer data safe, or cutting meeting prep time.
Move 3: Remove barriers, not just add training
The Evidence
Many employees want to learn but face practical blockers: no time allocated during working hours, no permission from line managers, or no access to devices for practice. When barriers are removed, engagement surges.
In Practice
When HMRC removed barriers and gave employees on-demand access to comprehensive training, they saw a 70% increase in the number of employees engaging with online courses.
Your First Step
Ask line managers one question: “Do your team members have protected time to complete digital training during working hours?” If the answer is no, that is your first fix, not another training module.
Move 4: Catch people at moments of change
The Evidence
Behavioural science shows that people are significantly more open to learning at transition points: new roles, restructures, promotions, or system changes. This is known as the fresh start effect.
In Practice
Onboarding is the most obvious moment, but promotions, team moves, and new software rollouts are equally powerful triggers. Embedding skills training at these points makes it feel natural, not extra.
Your First Step
Map your organisation's key transition moments. Add a 30-minute digital skills check-in to onboarding and internal role-change workflows. Use a colleague self-assessment to benchmark each new starter's confidence level.
Move 5: Measure the ripple, not just the click
The Evidence
Digital upskilling does not just improve individual productivity. It creates a ripple effect of social value: improved communication, greater choice, and enhanced contribution for families, teams, and communities.
In Practice
Use the FutureDotNow Calculator to quantify the economic impact of closing your organisation's digital skills gap and build a compelling case for sustained investment.
Your First Step
Run the calculator for your organisation. Share the results with your leadership team alongside training engagement data. This moves digital upskilling from “nice to have” to board-level priority.
Tools to help you turn insight into action.
Use these FutureDotNow resources to frame the business case, understand behaviour, and measure the value of essential digital skills development.
Learning that clicks
Understand what motivates workers to improve their digital skills and what works when designing upskilling programmes.
The FutureDotNow calculator
Estimate the economic benefits of closing essential digital skills gaps in your organisation.
The Ripple Effect
Explore how essential digital skills create social value through improved communication, greater choice, and enhanced contribution.
Turn insight into action with a FutureDotNow membership
FutureDotNow membership helps organisations put those insights into practice, providing access to practical resources, peer learning opportunities, expert guidance and tools that support workforce digital and AI skills development.
How membership helps
Membership connects the framework to practical action, helping organisations understand where they are now, where skills gaps exist and what to do next.
Access practical tools and resources
Explore guides, templates, research, examples and practical resources designed to help organisations build workforce digital capability.
Learn from peers
Connect with organisations facing similar challenges through member events, webinars and shared learning opportunities.
Share your impact
Share your organisation’s progress through member stories, webinars, case studies and FutureDotNow channels. Help shape the national conversation on workforce digital skills while highlighting the action your organisation is taking.
Keep the momentum going
Close the gap between awareness and action.
Digital upskilling works best when it becomes part of how people work, not a one-off course.
Sign up for FutureDotNow updates to get practical resources, case studies, event invitations and opportunities to help your organisation build workforce digital and AI confidence.
