As digital skills become more essential for workforce participation, addressing digital literacy gaps among disadvantaged workers has become a pressing issue for achieving economic growth for all. The authors assess changes in digital proficiency and labor market outcomes following participation in foundational digital-literacy training and highlight critical implications for policymakers, workforce developers, and educational organizations.

Assessing the Employment Impacts of Digital Upskilling for Low-Tech Adults

Results from a Pilot Study

George Zuo, Omari Jackson

ResearchPublished May 29, 2025

As digital skills become progressively more essential for workforce participation, addressing foundational digital literacy gaps among disadvantaged workers has become an increasingly pressing issue for achieving economic growth for all.

The authors summarize results from a pilot study of a course on foundational computer skills and digital literacy. The authors ran the pilot with the course's administrator, the nonprofit Byte Back, to understand how training on foundational digital skills can affect employment and digital engagement among low-income adult learners from underserved communities.

In this report, the authors assess changes in digital proficiency and labor market outcomes following participation in foundational digital-literacy training and highlight critical implications for policymakers, workforce developers, and educational organizations.

Key Findings

  • The lack of foundational digital literacy skills remains one of the primary reasons why individuals do not access the internet, even as costs and other barriers to digital access have fallen.
  • Following completion of nonprofit Byte Back's job-oriented Computer Foundations 1 course, students' daily computer use doubled, students' perceived computer proficiency rose significantly, and students exhibited considerable improvements in their labor market status. Employment rates nearly tripled, suggesting that foundational digital-literacy training provided clear initial benefits even without awarding advanced technical certifications. Although some of this increase might be due to concurrent participation in employment-related services, several tests suggest that Byte Back likely played an important role.
  • Despite these employment gains, nearly all respondents of our survey said that they were still actively searching for jobs. This suggests that, although foundational digital skills helped respondents break into the labor market, most remained in search of better jobs.
  • A plurality of respondents were between the ages of 25 and 34, suggesting that even young workers could benefit from foundational digital-skills training.

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Zuo, George and Omari Jackson, Assessing the Employment Impacts of Digital Upskilling for Low-Tech Adults: Results from a Pilot Study. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2025. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA3912-1.html.
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This research was sponsored by the WorkRise Network at the Urban Institute and conducted by RAND Education and Labor.

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