Digital Competence Assessment for Office, Frontline and Field RolesWhich rung of the digital ladder have you actually secured, and which one is next?
Thirty-six original exercises keyed to the five areas and four proficiency levels of the European Digital Competence Framework for Citizens — with no product named anywhere, and a report that claims a rung only when your whole band sits inside it.
A ladder that shows its rungs, its cuts and its uncertainty
The Digital Competence Assessment for Office, Frontline and Field Roles is a thirty-six exercise knowledge check of current digital practice at work, keyed to the five competence areas and four proficiency levels of DigComp 2.2, the European Commission's open-licence Digital Competence Framework for Citizens, and reported as a band ladder with the behaviour each rung describes written on it.
Most digital-skills tests are product tests: which menu, which button, which shortcut. Those measure familiarity with one vendor's screen and go stale on the next release. This one names no office suite, browser, messaging service or application anywhere, because the competence is the construct and a product name is not. Every exercise asks what current published practice asks for — what a padlock actually tells you, what an attribution licence requires, which second sign-in step is the weakest, what to check first when a shared file will not open — and the keys cite the guidance they come from.
The five areas are the framework's own: information and data literacy, communication and collaboration, digital content creation, safety, and problem solving. Each is measured in several formats — single choice, select every that applies, true or false, match the following and put in order — interleaved so that no format runs for long and the form measures the competence rather than a knack for one question shape.
Scoring is chance-corrected against an answer prior declared on every option, so zero is what a typical respondent scores and not half marks. The five areas are combined by a rule that is printed on the report rather than hidden in the code: weight by reliability only when the reliability spread across the areas is wide enough to justify it, and otherwise use equal weights and say so. The report shows both sets of weights so you can see what the decision changed.
The report is a ladder. The four proficiency levels of the framework — foundation, intermediate, advanced and highly specialised — are drawn as rungs, one ladder for each area and one overall, and every rung carries its behavioural descriptor, so the rung above yours is the development goal in the framework's own words. A rung is claimed only when your whole ninety-five per cent band sits inside it. Otherwise the report says which two rungs you are between, and why a thirty-six exercise form cannot always tell them apart.
The areas carry six to eight exercises each, which is not enough for a number, so none is printed for them: only the band on the ladder and a three-way placement against a typical respondent, with the refusal written out. The cuts between rungs are authoring cuts awaiting a standard-setting panel, and the report says that too. The framework is reused under its open licence with attribution; the European Commission does not endorse this instrument, and every exercise is an original work.
What you walk away with
Judging an unfamiliar site by what others say of it, reading a chart before trusting it, and keeping one shared file rather than six copies.
The right channel for bad news, for a quick question and for a decision that must be found in six months; sharing a link that expires rather than an attachment.
Formats that fit the need, documents a screen reader can use, a licence's attribution met, and a small automation built on a copy before it runs live.
What the padlock does and does not tell you, the current password guidance, the weakest second sign-in step, and the order of steps when a laptop starts misbehaving.
Isolating a fault before changing anything, matching a tool to a need rather than a feature list, and asking why a manual task exists before speeding it up.
Every ladder names the rung you have secured, or the two you are between, and prints the next rung's descriptor as the goal.
Inside your report
Illustrative sample — your report is generated from your own responses.
A rung is claimed only when the whole 95% band sits inside it. The area rails carry a band and a placement but no score, because each has fewer than eight exercises, and the next rung's descriptor is printed as the goal.
Unit weights are used, and that is a decision rather than a default: the reliability spread across the five areas is 0.06, below the 0.15 at which weighting by reliability earns its keep.
| Area | Omega | Equal share | Reliability share | Used |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Information | 0.74 | 20% | 20.6% | 20% |
| Communication | 0.71 | 20% | 19.9% | 20% |
| Content | 0.71 | 20% | 19.9% | 20% |
| Safety | 0.74 | 20% | 20.6% | 20% |
| Problem solving | 0.68 | 20% | 19.0% | 20% |
Both sets of weights are shown so the reader can see what the decision changed: here, no area would have moved by more than one point. When an area is left half-answered its reliability falls, the spread widens, and the same rule switches to reliability weights and says so.
Built for
- Office, frontline and field staff who want to know where their digital practice stands, in a framework their employer can read
- Learning and development teams placing people on a training pathway before choosing the course
- Public employment services and training providers who need a tool-neutral baseline that is not a vendor's product test
- Anybody about to sit a product-specific test who wants to know whether the gap is the product or the practice
Find the rung you have actually secured
36 exercises across five formats · about 30 minutes · six ladders, the weighting decision in the open, and one thing to change this week.
₹699 (incl. GST) · assessment and full report, nothing further to pay
Frequently asked questions
No. It is a knowledge check keyed to a public framework, it confers nothing, and it is not endorsed by the framework's authors. The report says so in body text, not in a footer, and it prints the cuts between rungs as provisional authoring cuts rather than as a grade.
No, deliberately. No product is named in any exercise. Every question asks what current published practice asks for — how to judge an unfamiliar site, what a padlock means, what an attribution licence requires, what to check first when a file will not open — so the same sitting is fair whatever software your workplace uses.
DigComp 2.2, the European Commission Joint Research Centre's Digital Competence Framework for Citizens, published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Its five competence areas are the five parts of the assessment and its four proficiency levels — foundation, intermediate, advanced and highly specialised — are the rungs of the report. The framework is reused with attribution; the European Commission does not endorse this instrument, and every exercise is an original work.
Because a rung is claimed only when your whole ninety-five per cent band sits inside it. A thirty-six exercise form has a band about twenty-five points wide and the middle rungs are forty points wide, so a boundary reading is common and honest. The report draws the band against the rungs so you can see why, and it still names the next rung's descriptor as your goal.
About thirty minutes for thirty-six exercises. ₹699 in India, inclusive of GST, or US$6.99 elsewhere, one time, for the sitting and the full report. It is free to retake, and the report names the change on the overall score that would count as a reliable change after twelve weeks.
Each one takes a single capability, puts you inside the situations where it is actually tested, and scores your choices against published evidence — with a report designed for that capability alone, not a template. They span hiring, compliance, education, operations and personal skill.
Browse the catalogue →Methodology: Thirty-six original exercises across five formats: twelve single-choice questions, eight select-every-that-applies exercises, six true-or-false claims, five matching exercises and five ordering exercises, interleaved so no format runs for long and none exceeds a third of the form. One response instruction is declared for the whole instrument and it is a KNOWLEDGE instruction: every exercise asks what current published practice asks for, never what the respondent would personally do, because digital competence at work is a body of current practice that can be known or not known, and a tendency instruction would measure confidence instead. Construct statement: this instrument measures knowledge of current digital practice in the five competence areas of the European Digital Competence Framework for Citizens, DigComp 2.2 - information and data literacy, communication and collaboration, digital content creation, safety, and problem solving - as applied in office, frontline and field work. It does not measure skill with any named product, typing or operating speed, programming ability, general intelligence, how the respondent actually behaves with their own devices, or whether they would follow the practice under pressure, and it is not a certificate. Every exercise is tool-neutral: no office suite, browser, messaging service or application is named, because a product name is construct-irrelevant knowledge. Scoring is a reliability-weighted composite, playbook design C13. Each area is scored as the mean quality of its answered exercises, chance-corrected against the answer prior declared on every option of every keyed exercise rather than against a uniform draw, so that zero means answering the way ordinary respondents answer. Reliability per area is McDonald's omega estimated from item count and a stated assumed inter-item correlation of .26, and the composite weights are proportional to those omegas ONLY when the spread of omega across the five areas exceeds .15; below that the instrument falls back to unit weights and prints the reason, because differential weighting on a small spread fits noise rather than signal, and the report shows both sets of weights so the reader can see what the decision changed. An unanswered exercise leaves both the raw and the chance term of its area, so a part-finished sitting is short rather than bad, and an empty sitting scores exactly zero. Every reported figure carries its standard error band from the assumed omega and an assumed score standard deviation of 24, both printed. The report is a band ladder, playbook design D2: the four DigComp proficiency levels - foundation, intermediate, advanced and highly specialised - drawn as rungs, one ladder per area and one overall, each rung carrying a behavioural descriptor so that the next rung is the development goal. A rung is claimed only when the whole 95 per cent band lies inside it; otherwise the report says the reading is on the boundary between two rungs, and for the areas, which carry six to eight exercises each, no number is printed at all - only the band on the ladder and a three-way placement against a typical respondent. The cut scores between rungs are authoring cuts, provisional until a modified-Angoff standard-setting panel replaces them, and they are printed on the report so that nobody mistakes them for a measurement. No percentile appears anywhere because no norm group exists yet. Keying sources: the European Commission Joint Research Centre's DigComp 2.2, The Digital Competence Framework for Citizens, with new examples of knowledge, skills and attitudes (Vuorikari, Kluzer and Punie, 2022, Publications Office of the European Union, EUR 31006 EN), which is reused here under its Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence with attribution, and whose five areas and four proficiency levels are the competencies and rungs of this instrument; DigComp 2.1 (Carretero, Vuorikari and Punie, 2017) for the eight proficiency levels and their descriptors; the original DIGCOMP framework (Ferrari, 2013); the Stanford History Education Group's civic online reasoning work on lateral reading (Wineburg and McGrew, 2019; McGrew et al., 2018); NIST Special Publication 800-63B, Digital Identity Guidelines: Authentication and Lifecycle Management (2017, with 2020 update) for passphrase length, the withdrawal of forced rotation and the restriction on codes sent by text; the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 (W3C, 2023) for headings, text alternatives and the use of colour; the Creative Commons licence suite (version 4.0) for attribution requirements; the internet-skills work of van Deursen and van Dijk (2011) on operational, formal, information and strategic skills; the OECD Survey of Adult Skills problem solving in technology-rich environments framework (OECD, 2012 and 2019); Tufte (2001) and Cairo (2016) on truncated axes and chart integrity; Haladyna, Downing and Rodriguez (2002) for item-writing and cue control; McDonald (1999) for omega; Wainer (1976) on why unit weights usually match differential ones; Cizek and Bunch (2007) for the modified-Angoff procedure the cuts await; and Harvill (1991) for the standard error of measurement and its band. Every exercise is an original work written for this instrument. The European Commission, its Joint Research Centre and the authors of DigComp do not endorse this instrument, and no affiliation with any certification, examination body or vendor is claimed.