We know from others that to become a digital organisation you need the right culture, and that developing the right skills in the workforce helps this. My first stop when thinking about how we implemented our digital strategy was our learning and development (L&D) colleagues.
I wanted to make sure we incorporated the development of digital skills as part of wider learning offer to the organisation, so it was seen as a central part of peoples roles rather than an add on. I also needed a way for people to learn more about our digital approach in Dorset.
Planning the Event
L&D came up with the idea of using Learning at Work week, we had previously won an award for how we used this week so they had a format of offering short (30-60 minute) taster sessions that was successful. We pulled together a task force including ICT, digital, L&D, Comms and Microsoft, to generate ideas of what we could do.
During our baseline work for digital we identified the growing digital champion network as a key enabler for digital change. We wanted to promote this work and recognise the importance of it so we scheduled in a presentation and provided the champions with lanyards and badges. In addition, the library service had been providing digital learning sessions for the community and introduced us to the company 2timesdo who helped us with coding and 3D printing.
In my previous role of ICT Business Partner for Children & Schools, I was part of a team that pulled together an annual ICT conference and had the opportunity to work with a school who are really creative in their use of digital. I approached the Head to see how they might be able to help us and that was the seed of the mobile innovation space that ran for a day during the week, using students from year 4 to demonstrate robotics, augmented reality, coding and more – this was a real hit.
We were keen to explore the use of voice technology as we have been looking at the benefits of it in adult social care. Some willing volunteers in ICT were keen to get involved and rigged up a simple demo with a lamp, plug and Amazon Alexa. As a result occupational therapists in children services have trialled the Alexa and discovered new opportunities.
We had been working with Microsoft around the deployment of M365 and they offered use of virtual reality for the space. We did have issues with this on the day due to security on our corporate network, but Microsoft were great at providing some goodies for people who visited the mobile innovation space.
It was then about providing a range of sessions that would appeal to others using existing contacts such as Adult Skills and Learning, FutureGov, Microsoft and ourselves to run them. We used multiple channels to advertise the week: Yammer, Sharepoint, Email, Learning Portal, Posters. A picture of the final programme is below.
The end result
Sessions were oversubscribed. It created excitement in the organisation, check out this clip of the week. 312 people attended sessions and feedback was great:
- ‘Really fabulous initiative’
- ‘A truly excellent week of opportunities’
- ‘It made a real buzz, amplify, perhaps once a quarter’
- ‘I now want to know more about all the topics, I don’t want to wait another year’
- ‘More please’
We had proved that there was appetite in the organisation to develop digital skills. In the Autumn Dorset Councils Partnership took this one step further and ran the Digital Academy, similar topics but instead of a taster session, offering courses. This too was a success and oversubscribed.
We decided to take the Learning at Work week format and apply to the recent Services week, this time we blogged and published the programme on twitter and LinkedIn. 120 people benefited from learning opportunities and what was great is we had a different audience to learning at work week because it wasn’t called digital, Services week really helped us explain that digital is about designing good modern services.
What worked well
- Using a variety of organisations/people to plan and deliver a range of learning
- The students from the Prince of Wales school who were brilliant at teaching the adults
- Offering bitesize learning opportunities
- A different name to reach a new audience
- Running a week of focused activities really helps raise the profile of a topic
- Advertise in multiple places – posters in toilets above the hand dryers still seem to work the best
- Using retrospectives at the end of sessions for instant feedback
- Practical sessions with an activity
- Freebies for people to take away + Stickers
What we would do differently
- Not run concurrent sessions
- January is not a great time, we battled sickness and snow during services week!
- We would include staff on our planning task force
- Advertise early – even if your programme isn’t fully formed. We held back leading up to services week waiting for national materials/info and this may have affected numbers
- Ensure posters go up at remote sites
- Do more in open spaces of a building to attract the attention of passers by
- More around user research – there was a real appetite about how to do this
What’s next
I’ve had my eye on the national digital skills framework, in the past we’ve used ECDL but it was interesting to hear at a recent Local Digital event a couple of councils have taken this as a starting point and developed their own. It would be a great way to integrate digital into recruitment and performance appraisal.
In the meantime we have developed an area on our learning portal with links out to resources to help the workforce develop their digital skills and knowledge, the first iteration will be released in March.
Learning at work week is on the 13th May 2019, the theme is shaping the future – ideal for digital!
