Digital Skills Charter

Defining Australia’s Digital Skills Opportunity

Digital Professionals

Australia needs to increase the number of digital professionals. 400k digital professionals required by 2032. New sources of digital talent must be found by reskilling, upskilling and making digital career pathways more accessible.

The Education Sector

The Australian education sector cannot meet this demand. HE graduated 6,000 ICT people. VET is slow to respond to changes in employer skills and there were only 7,459 completions of 28,325 ICT enrolments. On average it takes more than 12 months to change a training package. It takes 3 - 10 years to finish a degree.

Employer Satisfaction

45% of ICT employers are not satisfied with VET training.

Traditional VET competency based approaches do not provide people with the transferable skills needed by employers.

Quality Of Training

The quality of training design and delivery is variable. Of the 4,000 RTOs only 450 deliver ICT training. Often employers are not engaged nor involved.


Digital skills are now as important to individuals and our nation as reading and writing
Every person is a digital worker and every employer a digital employer. Collectively we know the change that must occur in order to close the digital skills gap, democratize digital learning and reset our national education system in order to develop the digital skills that industry and employers need.

The DSO and partners believe the solution lies in three core initiatives:

Creating Digital Pathways by providing a common language that describes digital career pathways, we make it easier for employers to define their digital skills needs. Industry demand shapes the pathways and skill clusters associated with them.


The pathways make it easier for employers and students to collaborate on opportunities.


Developing Digital Skills Standards Employer-led standards that define the core and common skills required ensure the relevance and consistency of training. These are industry standards that provide employers, training providers, and learners with clear guidance. Progress and attainment against the standard are evaluated independently.


Increase capacity and capability across the National Education System and Registered Training Providers by investing in Digital Centres Of Excellence capable of curating and sharing best practises across the network.

Shared beliefs and intent

From our discussions we know you share these beliefs and invite you to register your support through the signing of our charter.


A charter that seeks to support behind our core initiatives and a commitment to the design and adoption of new national digital skills system.

What does it mean to sign and support


  1. Demonstrates your support of the DSO mission and endorsement of the core initiatives.

  2. Advocacy of the DSO mission across your customers, employers and communities.

  3. Open to participation in Working Groups and Task Forces, represent industry, employers and the sector.

  4. Where possible, open to sharing suitable data and intelligence to enhance strategy and recommendations.

  5. Providing permission for the DSO to note your organisation as a 'DSO Supporter' in our communications.


As a leader in the Australian market we greatly appreciate your support and the message that it sends to the broader community.

Patrick Kidd OBE OAM

DSO CEO