Digital Skills Global
How can the online learning experience accelerate ROI for sponsoring businesses?

How can the online learning experience accelerate ROI for sponsoring businesses?

Online learning offers a great opportunity for sponsoring businesses to enhance the skills and abilities of their employees. Digital Skills Industry Partner projects are specifically geared towards enabling participants to develop relevant industry specific skills. Projects are developed specifically to be industry relevant for participants. Project teams are carefully selected to include key competencies in project management, digital marketing, big data visualization, digital business analysiscomputational thinking & behavioral economics, and relevant coding languages. Participating in these teams gives participants an invaluable, ‘real world’ opportunity to create something challenging and of value.

Current workplace practices such as agile development are closely integrated into the cycle of the industry projects. Teams work together to identify overall goals and evaluate reasonable targets for each ‘sprint’ during this time period. The challenges set for each project team provide an invaluable experience in helping participants to better understand the competencies required in working in international cross-functional teams. 

Example of an App developed by our participants for Telefónica.

Several assignments are required to be delivered throughout the programme using this agile methodology. This enables individual participants to take on different roles and responsibilities and learn more about areas they wish to upskill in. It is quite common for a designer to look at working on the backend coding for one sprint, or for a project manager to assist in the digital marketing activities. This enables team members to broaden their experience and skillset during their time on the programme. In this way the programme provides a great opportunity for participants to increase the ROI for their sponsoring company. 

Speaking with the Digital Skills  coaching coordinator, Dominic Martin explained. “Many large corporates have recognised that if they are to improve team performance, their managers and team leaders need to adopt a coaching based management style.  This shifts the traditional approach of management from one of authority and control to one of committed and responsible partnership. Our approach gives participants the experience of what is involved in adopting this particular style.”

Dominic further emphasised that in project reviews invariably the key attribute for any successful team was the ability to be able to work together well, rather than any specific technical tool or knowledge.

“Our experience and research of online teams has shown that success is down to factors such as keeping perspective and focus, clear and regular communication, building relationships and trust, being accountable and giving regular recognition to each other for a job well done. All too often teams focus exclusively on the detail of the task and ignore how they interact and engage with each other. So you could say that it is less about defining functional and non-functional requirements and more about the functioning of the team!”

Our experience in running multiple team based projects ensures that participants invariably highly value this part of the course. Many participants have cited it as the most useful and relevant learning experience that they brought back to their own work place subsequently.