The National Campaign for Learning held its annual Learning at Work week in May. It’s the biggest festival of workplace learning and this year the theme was ‘Shaping the Future’, which was particularly appropriate for a brand-new Council.
We ran a week of exciting events which started with Matt Prosser our Chief Executive giving a talk on inspiring futures and apprenticeships, and ended with a live-streamed discussion on how the Employee Forum can help Shape the Future of the organisation.
Planning the Event
We put together a team of extraordinary individuals from various areas including ICT, Digital, Learning & Development, Business Improvement and Communications, to generate ideas of what learning opportunities we could offer the organisation during the week.
In previous years Learning and Development have provided 30 minute taster sessions which has been successful, so we decided to keep to this format where possible. We wanted to provide a wide variety of activities and build on the energy and enthusiasm in the organisation.
Once the final programme had been agreed we used multiple channels to advertise the week: Yammer, Intranet, Email, Learning Portal, and Posters – we have learnt you can never do enough communication, and our Executive Directors promoted the week and the importance of taking time to learn in their vlogs.
Inspiring Futures
We learnt how apprenticeships and work-based learning opportunities can help shape the future of Dorset Council. We heard some of our amazing apprentices talk about their experiences, and the fabulous Fran Mitchem discuss the apprenticeship scheme at the council and how it can help teams and individuals develop skills and knowledge.
One of the most powerful parts of the session was using Slido to create a word cloud with everyone submitting one word that they use to describe apprentices highlighting their positive impact.
Mobile Innovation Space
Following the success of the space last year, we needed to make it bigger and better! Students from the Prince of Wales school were back introducing us to new technologies including an augmented reality t-shirt that showed a representation of the organs working inside the body on a mobile device. Gone are the days of having a plastic body with the organs in it, this is the future of children learning about how the body works.
TRICURO demonstrated their latest virtual reality experience which allows 2/3 people to interact at the same time. Sharing an experience with other people creates a bond and develops communication that you couldn’t achieve in a singular experience. TRICURO are having great success using the technology to help people with dementia.
We used 3D printing to produce our new logo, ran our accessibility bar to increase peoples understanding of why we need to design accessible services, and #digitalnorm made an appearance.
Other Sessions
We ran sessions to help people with writing content for social media and using Linkedin. It’s important for the Council to have an active presence on social media, equipping people with the knowledge and skills to use the right tool for the job and produce some amazing content.
Building a creative mind-set was a course that was oversubscribed when it ran last year as part of the Digital Academy, so we decided to run it again. As people get older they are left with less than 5% of the creativity they had as children. Creativity and innovation are vital as we move forward in Dorset Council, looking at things in a different way or approaching them differently. This session provided activities to help unlock our inner child.
We provided sessions on interview skills, making the most of spatial data, technology for Independent Living, Yoga and more!
Shaping the Future Live
To finish the week, we had planned a panel discussion with a selection of staff from the employee forum on Shaping the Future. This was livestreamed to all staff, enabling people to ask questions and get responses as it was broadcast. This was a test of the ‘format’ to see if it would be a useful approach for us to use in the council going forward.
We had some technical issues which mean we had to postpone until the 7th June, the second livestream was a success and we had lots of positive feedback from staff. Sometimes you just need to persevere, we are going to use this approach in future and try out podcasts to communicate with staff.
Sam McLaren – Project Officer Digital Programme
#digitaldorset
