Digital Competence: Importance of Being Included in the Higher Education Curriculum

The constant inclusion of new digital skills in job positions is evidence of the effects that the accelerated adoption of technology has generated in the labor market because of the pandemic; posing a challenge for the university education system that seeks to train its students to be successfully inserted in jobs. The objective of this study is to compare the dimensions of the digital competence found in the job offers of companies with those present in the syllabus’ contents of a university program in Social Sciences, as well as the relationship between academic performance and the level of the indicators of the dimensions of the digital competence. For the study, 20 companies were chosen from the ranking of the 500 largest companies in Peru in 2021 carried out by “América Economía”, 43 syllabi of the program, and the survey was applied to 185 students. In this research, it was found that the understanding of technical concepts, research and visual and/or audible identification indicators present the highest averages, that is, they are the skills most required by companies. Visual and/or audible identification and respect for others have low averages because it is not common to find them in the job offers of the companies, and problem solving has not been found in any of the job offers. These same results were found in the syllabus’ contents. More than half of the students are distributed in the high and very high levels, with 04 indicators in which no student is in the low level. We concluded that, despite the high and very high level of the dimensions of digital competence achieved by a high number of the students who participated in our study, it is coinciding with the current requirements of the company; it is imminent not only to reformulate the curriculum that already contains training in digital skills, but also to include it in the curricula that do not consider it, so that the University ensures that its students can successfully face the technological innovations that companies will make in the future.