There's a particular kind of embarrassment that some adults carry into digital learning — a feeling that they "should already know this", or that needing to learn these things at their age is somehow unusual. Neither idea is accurate, but both can significantly undermine the learning process if they go unexamined.
The reality is that a substantial portion of the UK adult population has significant gaps in digital literacy, and those gaps are not evenly distributed. They often follow patterns related to the kinds of work someone has done, the educational institutions they attended, and the decade in which they entered the workforce. None of these things are personal failures — they're historical facts.
This article is written for people who are at the beginning of developing digital skills, or who are supporting someone else who is. It's also written for people who have started multiple times and given up, wondering why progress feels so slow and difficult. The goal is to offer a more honest account of what the process actually involves — and what actually makes a difference.
What "Digital Skills" Actually Means
The term covers an enormous range of capabilities, and part of what makes getting started so confusing is the absence of a clear map. "Digital skills" can mean anything from knowing how to use a spreadsheet to writing code, from managing a social media presence to understanding cybersecurity principles.
For most adult learners, a useful initial distinction is between foundational digital literacy — the skills needed to function confidently in any digital environment — and domain-specific skills that are required for a particular kind of work.
Foundational digital literacy includes things like: navigating file systems and cloud storage; using productivity tools (word processors, spreadsheets, email, calendars) effectively; understanding how to manage your digital identity safely; communicating clearly across digital platforms; and knowing how to find, evaluate, and use information online.
Domain-specific skills build on this foundation and vary enormously depending on the professional direction you're interested in. A digital marketer needs a different skill set to a data analyst, who needs a different set again to a UX designer or a project manager using digital tools. Starting with a clear sense of which layer you're working on — and in what order — removes a great deal of confusion and frustration early on.
The Advantage That Adult Learners Often Overlook
Educational psychology has long established that adult learners approach learning differently from younger students, and not always at a disadvantage. Adults bring a quality that younger learners often lack: the ability to connect new information to existing experience, which can significantly accelerate the process of making sense of new concepts.
A person who has spent years managing projects, navigating complex organisations, or communicating across different stakeholder groups has already developed sophisticated cognitive capabilities. When those capabilities are applied to digital learning, they can translate into a faster-than-expected ability to understand why tools and processes are designed the way they are — not just how to use them.
The adult who asks "but why does it work this way?" is often making faster cognitive progress than the younger learner who simply follows the instruction without that question.
The challenge for adult learners tends not to be intellectual capacity — it's usually one of three things: available time, confidence, and learning method.
Time: The Honest Constraint
Most adult learners are not students in the traditional sense. They have jobs, family responsibilities, caring duties, social commitments, and the ordinary demands of adult life. The idea that digital skills can be developed in intensive weekend sessions or that a few hours here and there will produce rapid progress can set people up for significant disappointment.
The research on skill acquisition — and the experience of working with adult learners directly — suggests that consistency beats intensity every time for most people. Three or four focused hours per week, sustained over several months, tends to produce better outcomes than intermittent bursts of six-hour days followed by weeks of nothing.
This is partly because learning requires consolidation time — the period between sessions when the brain organises and stores what it encountered. It's also because consistent habits are far easier to maintain than intensive efforts, which tend to conflict with the realities of adult life and are typically abandoned after the first disruption.
Confidence: The Quiet Barrier
It's worth being direct about this: a lack of confidence around technology is one of the most significant barriers that adult learners report, and it operates in ways that aren't always obvious.
It shows up as avoidance — putting off starting because the prospect of getting things wrong feels uncomfortable. It shows up as an excessive focus on understanding everything before attempting anything — which sounds thorough but is actually a sophisticated form of procrastination. And it shows up as a tendency to attribute difficulties to personal inadequacy rather than to the genuinely steep learning curve that everyone encounters at the beginning.
The evidence on confidence-building in learning is fairly consistent: the most effective approach is to do things, get things wrong, observe that being wrong is survivable and informative, and repeat. This feels simple but is in practice quite difficult for adults who have moved into contexts where they are competent and respected — and who find it uncomfortable to occupy the position of beginner again.
Environments that normalise being wrong, that acknowledge difficulty as expected rather than exceptional, and that provide genuine encouragement without empty praise tend to produce better outcomes for adult learners precisely because they address this barrier directly.
Learning Method: What Actually Works
The digital learning market has expanded enormously over the past decade, and the sheer volume of available resources can itself become a barrier. Many adult learners start with the most accessible option — free tutorial videos, or a well-known online platform — and then spend significant amounts of time jumping between different resources without making coherent progress.
What tends to work better is structure. A defined learning pathway, with clear progression from one topic to the next, and some form of accountability or feedback, tends to produce more consistent progress than self-directed exploration of individual resources. This is not because self-directed learning is bad — it can be excellent — but because it requires a level of metacognitive skill that most beginners, by definition, don't yet have in a new domain.
Active learning — actually doing things, producing something, applying what you've encountered — is consistently more effective than passive consumption. Watching a tutorial is not the same as following that tutorial while doing the thing on your own screen, pausing to make mistakes, and troubleshooting them. This is especially true in digital skills, where so much of the actual learning happens through practice.
The Role of Deliberate Practice
One concept from the research on expertise that is particularly applicable to digital skill-building is that of deliberate practice — learning that is focused specifically on the edges of your current capability, involves effort and discomfort, and incorporates feedback.
In practical terms for a digital learner, this means resisting the temptation to do the things you already know how to do (which feels productive but isn't), and instead regularly attempting tasks that are just beyond your current comfort level. It means seeking out feedback — from instructors, from peers, from the real-world performance of whatever you've created — rather than avoiding it.
This is harder than it sounds, and it's genuinely uncomfortable. It's also, according to the available evidence, the mechanism through which skill actually develops — as opposed to the feeling of progress that can come from easier, more comfortable activity.
Practical Starting Points
If you're at the very beginning of digital skill development, a few practical suggestions based on what we've observed working for adult learners:
Start narrower than you think you need to. The impulse to learn "everything digital" is understandable but counterproductive. Pick a single, clear starting point — one tool, one concept, one small capability — and develop genuine fluency with that before expanding. Breadth without depth tends to produce shallow knowledge that's difficult to build on.
Build a sustainable weekly routine before any intensive effort. Know when and where you'll practise, for how long, and what you'll work on. The routine itself is part of the skill you're building — and it's one that will serve you regardless of what you learn within it.
Find a learning context that provides genuine feedback. This might be a structured programme, a mentor, a peer learning group, or simply an approach that involves regularly attempting real tasks and observing the results. Feedback closes the loop between effort and improvement.
Expect difficulty and expect it to be temporary. The first several weeks of learning something new usually involve more confusion than clarity. This is not a sign that you're not suited to it — it's the normal experience of learning. Getting through this period requires some tolerance for discomfort, and the knowledge that the fog does, reliably, begin to lift.
What We Observe at Dexivano
In working with adult learners across our programmes, a few patterns consistently emerge. Learners who progress most reliably tend to be honest with themselves about how much time they can genuinely commit and build their learning around that, rather than the time they wish they had. They tend to ask for help earlier than those who struggle in silence. And they tend to have a specific, concrete goal in mind — not necessarily a certain salary or role, but a specific capability they want to develop — which gives them something to measure progress against.
Those who find it hardest tend to combine high expectations with unrealistic timelines. The disappointment that follows when progress is slower than hoped can damage motivation in ways that outlast the immediate frustration. We spend a significant amount of our learner support energy working with people through this particular difficulty — helping them recalibrate expectations without abandoning their goals.
Closing Thoughts
Building digital skills as an adult is a realistic, achievable goal for most people — with the caveat that "realistic" and "quick" are not the same thing, and that "achievable" depends heavily on how the learning is approached and how much time is genuinely invested.
The good news is that adults who approach this process with patience, honesty about their starting point, and a willingness to work through difficulty tend to develop more robust and applicable skills than those who rush through surface-level content in search of certificates. That robustness, built more slowly, tends to be far more useful in practice.
If you have questions about starting your own digital learning journey, our team is always happy to have an honest conversation about what might suit your situation. Our contact page has all the details.