ICDL CERTIFICATION | Canada's Association of Information Technology Professionals

WHY CERTIFICATION?

Certification provides objective verification of employees’ skills, which enables your organization to assess and plan workforce training and ensure that staff skills meet Internationally-recognized standards.

ICDL certification:

• Defines the set of skills that employees need to be effective

• Provides a means to assess workforce skills and build a training plan

• Proves employees have the skills to carry out their work competently

• Offers a clear measure of the return on investment in training

• Acts as motivation for employees to complete the training

BENEFITS OF DIGITALLY LITERATE EMPLOYEES

Skilled employees work more effectively with the support of technology, thus achieving specific goals more efficiently and in a shorter time. They can produce professional quality documents and presentations without support from other staff, carry out complex calculations, manage emails effectively, understand associated risks and keep the organization’s IT systems secure.

Through reducing administrative burdens, improving external and internal communications and eliminating the lack of skills that can lead to wasted money and time, digitally literate staff can help your organization perform at its best.

Skilled employees enable organizations to use technology more effectively, leading to increases in productivity and competitiveness and ensuring that operational objectives are achieved more efficiently. ICDL certification programs are used to increase the value of human capital and achieve productivity gains through developing competent employees. They have been widely adopted by all levels and sizes of organizations – within education systems, governments (Public Administrations and Ministries), and commercial organizations (Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to large multinationals).

An Italian study on the ‘Cost of Ignorance’ found that ECDL / ICDL certification gives a total return on investment of €2,261 per person annually as well as 47% competence increase from pre-training levels.

ICDL IN THE WORKPLACE

Digitally Illiterate Employees:

Spend time trying to find and use a function that they ‘know’ the application can carry out
Manually input calculable data into spreadsheets increasing the risk of errors
Struggle with databases and are ‘afraid’ of the application
Have difficulty managing their emails and are unaware of associated security risks
Phone helpdesk / tech support to install and set up devices and drivers and lose productivity while waiting for assistance
Waste time typing individual letters, envelope labels and other communications targeted at large groups
Spend a lot of time producing poor quality documents and presentations, which often need revision

Digitally Literate Employees:

Produce professional quality documents and presentations efficiently without support from other staff
Actually know the functions of their applications and use them to carry out tasks in seconds
Install devices independently, set it up and get on with their jobs
Use mail merge in word processing to get the job done in a short amount of time
Use formulas and functions to efficiently and effectively carry out complex calculations
Confidently run queries and generate reports displaying information that would take time to produce manually
Manage emails effectively, understand associated risks and keep the organisation’s systems secure

ORGANIZATIONS THAT HAVE CERTIFIED STAFF

Over 60 governments and ministries of education around the world have adopted ICDL certification programs for their employees and / or citizens. International organizations including the UN, UNDP, UNESCO and USAID support the implementation of ECDL Foundation’s certification programs in developing markets. Multinational companies such as DHL, L’Oreal, Volkswagen and Toyota are just a small selection of the many commercial organizations that have provided ECDL / for their staff.

ICDL Canada is endorsed by leading National organizations such as CIPS, Action TI and ITAC.

For more information see www.icdl.ca or contact ICDL Canada at info@icdl.ca