Digital skills are a prerequisite today for working, studying, civic participation, and maintaining social relationships in our digitalised technical world. These skills are also important both as a general goal and an instrument for learning. This study briefly presents the aims that are related to digital skills of the Finnish curricula, and explores, using a large sample (N = 3,206) of Finnish upper secondary school students, these young people’s digital skills and their distribution. The study provides new insights into the state of these skills and differences found in them and focuses on the relationship between these results and the students’ present educational choices and future study/employment intentions. The actual variability of digital skills among upper secondary students is one of the main findings of the study. On the same educational level, it was found that digital skills vary enormously, particularly for students’ current educational choices and their future intentions. Digital skills are also distinctly associated with age for 15 to 22-year-olds. At the same time, gender alone appears to have no prominent effect on the level or adeptness of upper secondary school students’ digital skills.

The concept of new literacies refers to new forms of literacy. The meaning of literacy is constantly changing as new technologies and new social practices emerge. To be literate in the future means being able to use a combination of new technologies and new social practices that have not yet appeared. This has important implications for education. In this paper, we analyse Finnish educational policy and strategy papers from 1998 to 2014 conducting textmining and traditional close reading. By means of lexical dispersion we separate three distinct time periods: before 2005, the years 2005–2010 and after 2010. By close reading and topic modeling, we examine the emergence of new literacies in our research material and how thisis related to the sociocultural contexts of each period of time.