Leveraging Digital Skills: Immigrant-Origin High School Graduates Offer a Pool of Talent for U.S. Employers

Ninety-two percent of jobs across all U.S. industries require some level of digital skills, the National Skills Coalition estimated in a 2023 study. While IT or IT-related jobs have always relied on workers’ ability to use computers and digital technologies, across industries today’s workers may be asked to use and interact with a broad range of digital technology tools. While demand for technologically savvy students and workers is growing, about one in four U.S. adults ages 16-65 lack digital skills, according to the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), the international benchmark of adult skills that was last carried out in 2017. The PIAAC analysis shows that young adults are less likely to lack digital skills than U.S. adults overall, although skills vary by immigrant generation. Only 7-8 percent of second and third-and-higher-generation young adults lacked basic digital skills, while 17 percent of first-generation immigrant young adults scored low on the digital skills test.