How to Assess Your Staff’s Digital Skills

Assessing your staff’s digital skills before and during digital transformation

Many transformation projects stumble because management assumed staff would learn on their own. A digital skills assessment shows the real gap between what the team knows and what the new system requires, and helps you train each person for their role. What matters is that the assessment is carried out in a spirit of support, not examination.

Digital maturity assessment 5 min read

By Nour Aldein Tleti. Updated 7 October 2026.

How do you assess your staff’s digital skills in a useful, fair way?

First define the skills each role actually needs, then test them with short practical tasks drawn from real work rather than theoretical questions. Add a simple questionnaire about each employee’s confidence with the tools and attitude to change. The result is a map showing who needs basic training, who needs training on the system and who can help colleagues.

Digital skill levels

The basics: Using email, saving, naming and finding files, and handling links and attachments safely.
Everyday work tools: Spreadsheets, shared documents, WhatsApp Business and a shared calendar.
Specialised systems: Entering data accurately in the sales, accounting or inventory system, and understanding permissions and the order of steps.
Reading data: Understanding reports and dashboards, spotting figures that don’t make sense and using them in daily decisions.
Digital safety: Recognising scam messages, protecting passwords and being careful with unknown files and links on WhatsApp and email.

How to measure skills without embarrassing anyone

Short tasks from real work: Such as finding an old invoice in the shared folder, adding a new customer correctly or filtering a table by date.
A self-confidence questionnaire: Ask each employee how comfortable they are with each tool and what they find difficult, without linking the answers to their performance review.
Observation during work: Watch how repetitive tasks are done; you may find workarounds that reveal a need for training or simplification.
Short one-to-one sessions: A calm conversation brings out real fears, such as fear of making mistakes in front of colleagues or of losing their job.
Individual results, no public comparison: Show each employee their result and learning plan privately, and avoid ranking staff in front of each other.

What to watch for in Syria

Wide differences in experience: The same team may include an experienced employee used to paper-based work and a young colleague who is quick with apps; both matter and need different training.
Phone before computer: Many staff are more skilled on phones than on computers, and choosing tools that work well on mobile narrows the skills gap.
Arabic content: Training, guides and interfaces in Arabic speed up learning, especially for those who are not comfortable with English.
Staff turnover: As teams change, knowledge should be documented in short guides and videos, not held in one person’s head.

Skills map by role

Role	Core skills required	How to test
Salesperson	WhatsApp Business and accurate entry of customers and orders	Record a complete test order from message to quote
Accountant	Advanced spreadsheets, the accounting system and recording two currencies	Prepare a customer statement that includes exchange differences
Storekeeper	Entering receipts, issues and stock counts on phone or computer	Record a goods receipt and a transfer between two warehouses
Manager	Reading reports and dashboards and making decisions from them	Interpret a monthly sales report and draw three observations
Customer service agent	Organised replies on WhatsApp and phone, and logging and following up complaints	Follow a test complaint from logging to closure

Read also

Digital maturity assessment

Frequently asked questions

Do we assess skills before or after choosing the system?

Both. Before, to know whether the system suits your team’s abilities; after, to build the training plan around the actual system.

What do we do with an employee who refuses to learn?

Understand the reason first; refusal is usually fear of making mistakes or of losing status. One-to-one training and involving them in testing change their attitude in many cases.

Who are change champions?

Employees who master the tools and have their colleagues’ trust. Giving them a role in supporting others takes pressure off management and speeds up adoption.

Should the results stay confidential?

Individual results stay between the employee and the person responsible for training. The overall picture for the team can be shared to justify the training plan.

Is external training necessary?

It helps with new systems and digital security, but many basics can be taught in-house with short guides and hands-on sessions.