Student’s Digital Transformation During Higher Education: Entrance and Exit Digital Profile

Abstract

Digital technology has entered almost all areas of our daily lives to the point that we call our own society the Digital one. In the last 2 years with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, that has forced most of us to work from our homes, connecting online, this aspect of growing more digital has accelerated. This transition to remote work reminded us, once more, of the need to empower students with the required digital skills, or e-skills, to enter the labour market that "demands highly skilled people" [1], to perform lifelong learning, and to help answering the call of the European Commission's Digital Compass targets of developing digital competences until 2030. This paper is the first part of an ongoing research that aims to understand the Higher Education (HE) Students' Digital Profile when they enter HE, and then assess if their existing digital profile is correspondent to the labour market´s ideal profile when they finish their studies. This research also and foremost aims to design a research model for Student's Digital Profile, providing us with the opportunity to assess this on a yearly basis, to the students that enter HE and the ones that are finishing their studies, helping Higher Education Institutions perceive if their studies' syllabus are adequate to empower students with the needed workforce digital competences each specific field of expertise requires. As this study is correspondent to the first part of this research, this paper will focus on the literature review and research methodology that will lead us to our first results.