Our Enablers workstreams tackle the most urgent systemic barriers to progress.
We help employers understand their digital skills journey and curate practical tools and resources so organisations can act quickly to support working-age adults build the essential digital skills for work.
Enabler workstreams
Bringing together individuals from across the FutureDotNow coalition, our cross-sector workstream teams are addressing some of the key challenges to building a digitally capable workforce.
Accreditation and badging
The workstream on accreditation and digital badging is being led by our partners at City and Guilds.
Early focus is on prototype testing as part of the Essential Digital Skills & AI Employability Project, and exploring linkages to the Digital Badging Commission led by FutureDotNow Strategic Partner Ufi VocTech Trust.
Benchmarking maturity
Organisations need a clear way to understand where they are on their digital skills journey and what to do next.
Our Benchmarking and Maturity workstream is responding to this by developing, testing and scaling a self-assessment methodology that is simple, credible and valuable in real-world settings.
A future-fit essential digital skills framework
In early 2026, the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology announced they would be taking on stewardship of the Essential Digital Skills Framework. This is an important progress point.
Our work to influence the future shape and adoption of the framework continues.
Tools & solutions
Thanks to significant progress in 2025, we now have a large bank of content to support organisations in helping people build the essential digital skills, as well as tools to benchmark progress against peers.
Our priority is to curate these resources and make them even easier to access.
FutureDotNow’s work is both essential and impactful. Thanks to their Economic Impact, Learning that Clicks and Ripple Effect reports, the NHS has been able to make a strong, evidence-based case that includes essential digital skills as a key pillar for the first time. This will enable the UK’s largest employer to bring much needed attention and action to address this critical skills gap in our current and future workforce and for the people we serve.
James Freed,
Deputy Director, The NHS Digital Academy
