The Essential Digital Skills You Need To Know

The brave new world is entirely digital. We live our lives through social media and we shop online. We read the news online and even look for love over the internet.

Companies are embracing the digital world and that means an entire new skillset is needed. Digital skills are becoming more and more necessary in every industry. The basics behind websites and social media are all similar. We all need to know how to work in a digital world. Here are the essential skills everyone should learn.The brave new world is entirely digital. We live our lives through social media and we shop online. We read the news online and even look for love over the internet.

Basic coding - Behind every website, app or piece of content is a series of coded language. It is this code that tells our computers how to display the content we see. The very deep, dark depths of coding is very complex and best left to experts. However, the simple bits of code that create content and basic websites are very simple to learn. HTML and CSS is the linguistic core behind most of the internet’s content. Learn them.

SEO basics - The skills and practices behind effective search engine optimisation are always changing. That makes it quite difficult to stay up to date. However, the basics remain similar. Teach yourself the basics of Google’s algorithms and how to optimise web content. Learn how link building and keywords affect search ranking. If this is all sounds like a foreign language there are plenty of online SEO tuition sources.

Data analytics - Lurking at the back of every website is an analytics reader. It monitors the activity on every website and gathers data. It measures how long people stay on a site, how they got here and what country they’re from. Understanding analytics will help you get a sense of how well your website is working. It tells you what content is good and what could be better. Analytics can also be found behind your social media sites and YouTube videos.

Video and photo editing - the digital world revolves around multimedia. You’ll notice that thousands of pictures appear on your social media every day. The same is true for video content. Did you know that 60 hours of footage are uploaded to YouTube every minute. There are huge amounts of multimedia content on the web. All of it connects with people in a different way. Whatever career you pursue, there will always be a need for photo and video content. You ought to know the basics of editing.

Digital publishing. - If you’ve ever wondered how words get onto the internet, you need to look into digital publishing. It’s the process by which every sentence and every image gets uploaded to the internet. In almost all cases, people use a ‘content management system’ or CMS. They are very simple to get to grips with - much like writing onto a word document. In the future, there will be even more content creation and digital publishing will drive it all. Harness the knowledge now.

These are all skills that have developed with rapid speed. Those that master them will equip themselves for most careers in the future. Happy learning!