Abstract:

Generally, the literacy is viewed as a tool used for socialising and cultivating of a personality, intellectual refining and enrichment of personal life which broadens the opportunities of one's fulfilment in professional areas. The basic literacy includes the ability to write, read and count. However, in the recent time there has appeared more and more literacies which are called either Second Literacies, or New Literacies or Contemporary Literacies.

An increasing amount of usage of digital devices sets new requirements on functional skills which people need in order to successfully assert themselves within the society. Controlling of a computer and its software on user level is a matter of Computer Literacy.
The ability to use the information and communication technology in order to fulfil the personal, educational and labour-market oriented goals has been dealt with by various educational organisation since the nineties. In the Czech Republic, the issue has been addressed on the governmental level by State information policy – the road to the information society which also focused on the computer literacy as it is one of the principal pillars of effective public administration. Following the example of neighbouring countries, the supranational concept of computer literacy testing began to win the recognition. Those who passed the testing are given an international certificate which is recognised in EU countries (ECDL project - European Computer Driving Licence). The unified system of testing and internationally accepted certificates is a standard in developed western countries. Unfortunately, the Czech Republic eventually decided to follow another line and therefore, the overall verification by means of the standardised tests has never happened.

This paper deals with the analysis of governmental policy of education in the area of life-long education with special focus on the computer literacy of the employees in public administration. The paper is supplemented by a quantitative research. Its aim is to map ICT competencies of public administration employees using the comparison of declared and actual computer literacy which will be carried out by means of questionnaire research and a practically oriented non-standardised test. The results of these two parts will be interpreted by utilisation of statistical methods.

Keywords:

Life-long education, Computer literacy, public administration, research, Czech Republic.