ICDL Workforce Launched | New Standard for Digital Skills

Reflecting the needs of the modern IT professional, ICDL Ireland has introduced ICDL Workforce, the new standard in digital skills for all workers. In 2015, ICS won an ICDL Foundation Best Practice Award for the ‘ECDL in the Workplace’ category.
ICDL Workforce was inspired from such achievements.Edwina Fogarty, HR and Operations Manager with ICS, has been using ICDL for years to assess, train and certify the team at ICS.

“At ICS, we try to practise what we preach. We know that all users’ skills are different. That’s why we use ICDL diagnostic tests to match training resources with individual training needs, whether Support (databases), Marketing (web editing, image editing), or Finance (spreadsheets). ICDL Workforce has been an invaluable tool when guiding employees towards the right training,”

“While ICDL has long been the de facto standard for Microsoft Office skills, the new ICDL Workforce standard reflects the changing needs of business. There’s a lot more choice and flexibility with ICDL these days, allowing managers to develop the particular skills that their team needs,”
Besides using ICDL to train our own staff at ICS, we have also helped over 700,000 people in Ireland with essential office skills through ICDL. It was invented in Ireland almost 30 years ago and since then has gone on to be used in 148 countries worldwide.

“I think the fact that it is internationally recognised and vendor neutral is hugely important. Our modules are not just tied to MS Office products but include newer programs such as Google Spreadsheets and Dropbox.”

There are so many tools out there that people like to use. ICDL tries to cover all of the most important ones and has recently brought on courses like Data Protection Essentials and IT Security to reflect the Cybersecurity and Data Protection challenges that all workplaces now face.
ICDL is also constantly updated to the latest Windows and MS Office versions so our learners get the best experience.

“Like any employer, we are always trying to increase our efficiency and reduce the administrative burdens our small but busy team at ICS has to manage. We have six membership societies, ICDL Ireland and a range of charitable programmes such as Scratch, TechWeek and F1inSchools so there’s a lot to do.”

“Knowing that the profits from our societies and ICDL go towards helping kids code and engineer or helping bridge the digital divide in IT literacy for older people through programmes such as Benefit4 and GetIrelandOnline makes it all worthwhile,” said Edwina.