Two years ago, we introduced the three literacies framework: the idea that modern professionals need three fundamental competencies beyond their domain expertise. Health literacy, financial literacy, and tech literacy. We've written about the first two. This is the third, and in many ways, the one that connects the other two.
What You Need to Know
- Tech literacy isn't about coding. It's about understanding how technology decisions affect your work, your organisation, and your autonomy
- In 2022, tech-illiterate professionals are making technology-dependent decisions daily, often without realising it
- Tech literacy has three layers: functional (using tools), critical (evaluating tools), and strategic (understanding how technology shapes options)
- Organisations that invest in tech literacy across all roles, not just IT, make better technology decisions and adopt new tools faster
What We Mean by Tech Literacy
Let's be clear about what this isn't. Tech literacy isn't learning to code. It isn't becoming an IT expert. It isn't knowing the difference between AWS and Azure.
Tech literacy is the ability to understand, evaluate, and make informed decisions about the technology that affects your work and life. It's the technology equivalent of being able to read a balance sheet (financial literacy) or understand a health provider's advice well enough to make good decisions (health literacy).
Three layers, from practical to strategic:
Functional literacy
Can you use the tools you need to do your job effectively? This sounds basic, but it's uneven in every organisation we work with. Some team members use 30% of their software's capability and work around the rest. They're productive, but they're also creating inefficiency that compounds across the organisation.
Functional literacy isn't about mastering every feature. It's about knowing enough to use the tools well and recognising when you're working harder than you need to.
Critical literacy
Can you evaluate technology claims? When a vendor says their product "integrates seamlessly" or "uses AI," do you know what questions to ask? When your organisation is choosing between platforms, can you participate in that conversation meaningfully?
73%
of business leaders say they feel pressure to adopt AI tools but lack confidence to evaluate vendor claims
Source: Gartner C-Suite Technology Survey, 2022
Critical literacy is where the gap is widest. Most professionals can use their tools. Far fewer can evaluate whether they're using the right tools, or whether the next tool being proposed is genuinely better.
Strategic literacy
Can you understand how technology decisions shape your organisation's options? How does the choice of cloud provider affect your ability to switch in three years? How does adopting a proprietary platform affect your negotiating position? How does automation change which roles exist?
Strategic literacy is primarily a leadership concern, but it shouldn't be exclusive to leadership. Everyone in an organisation makes small technology decisions daily, choosing tools, sharing data, creating workarounds. Those decisions aggregate into strategic reality.
Why It Matters Now
Technology has always been part of work. What's changed is the degree to which technology decisions are embedded in every role, not just IT roles.
A marketing manager choosing an analytics platform is making a data governance decision. A finance team adopting a new invoicing tool is making an integration architecture decision. A project manager selecting a collaboration platform is making a security and privacy decision. None of them would describe it that way, and that's the problem.
The research on digital capability consistently shows that the most effective organisations aren't the ones with the best IT departments. They're the ones where non-technical staff can engage with technology decisions at a level beyond "make it work."
Dr Tania Wolfgramm
Chief Research Officer
The Three Literacies Together
This connects back to why we framed these as a set. Health literacy helps people sustain their performance. Financial literacy helps people make good decisions about resources. Tech literacy helps people navigate the systems and tools that mediate nearly all modern work.
They're complementary. A financially literate person who is tech-illiterate will make poor technology investment decisions. A tech-literate person who is health-illiterate will burn out building systems. An organisation that invests in all three creates people who can make good decisions across the full scope of their work.
What Organisations Can Do
Stop treating technology training as an IT function
Tech literacy isn't about IT training everyone on the new CRM. It's about building a baseline understanding of technology concepts across the organisation. Data privacy, system integration, automation capabilities, security basics. These concepts are relevant to every role.
Include non-technical staff in technology decisions
When choosing a new platform, involve the people who will use it, not as testers after the decision is made, but as participants in the evaluation. This isn't just good practice. It's how you build critical literacy.
Create space for technology questions
Most professionals won't ask "what does that mean?" in a meeting about technology because they don't want to seem ignorant. Create environments where technology questions are welcome. Lunch-and-learns, dedicated Q&A channels, technology explainers in plain language.
The most dangerous person in a technology decision is the one who's too embarrassed to say they don't understand what's being proposed. Often, they didn't.
Isaac Rolfe
Managing Director
Measure it
You can assess tech literacy the same way you assess any organisational capability. Surveys, self-assessment tools, practical evaluations. The point isn't to grade people, it's to understand where the gaps are so you can address them.
The Compounding Effect
Like health and financial literacy, tech literacy compounds. An organisation that invests in it now will make better technology decisions over the next five years. Those better decisions compound into lower costs, faster adoption of new tools, and more strategic flexibility.
The investment isn't large. It's attention, education, and inclusion. The return is an organisation that can navigate technology change without being dependent on a handful of experts or a vendor's sales team.
That's the third literacy. And with all three, you've got a team that can look after themselves, manage resources wisely, and navigate the technology that increasingly shapes everything else.