Workplace Digital Essential Skills in Rural Small Businesses - Final Research Report

The purpose of this report is to present results of the analysis by the Social Research and Demonstration Corporation, which assesses the success of the implementation on a number of pre-determined indicators and describes the outcomes of participants and their employers. [...] The second chapter describes the training process, the research framework, and the accompanying data collection activities that support the evaluation of the implementation and outcomes of participants and employers. [...] These include variables such as the dosage or intensity of training (the number of hours of training taken); the amount taken autonomously; and the technical aspects of the training related to software and hardware, as well as the environment in which the training is taken. [...] The latter set of outcomes is in keeping with a longer term objective of the digital skills training in this project: to increase the performance and competitiveness of the participating organizations by enabling them to increase the digital skills of their employees. [...] While outcomes of the training are presented in the next chapter, this section presents, first, a description of the training in terms of number of participants taking each digital task area, the mean number of hours, and the number of online sessions.