Designing a Digital Skills Strategic Review and Transformation Program
Monday, Oct 22 3:15 - 4:00
Presented by Tracy Playle and Richard ProwseThe University of Bath (UK) identified a need to upskill a wide range of communications and marketing professionals (including the web team) in their approach to digital engagement. The easy option would be to plan a programme of workshops and other professional development activities, but the University wanted to ensure that the training programme was addressing the right skills gaps, and offered greater awareness of individual needs.
Working with Tracy Playle and Robert Perry, higher ed specialist consultants, a skills assessment structure, scoring system and testing approach was designed to understand in a clear and measurable way skill levels and skill gaps amongst over 100 members of staff. This led to the design of a digital skills transformation programme and personal development plans for each member of the team. The training embraced facilitated training and workshops but also the accessed the vast array of existing (and free!) training online, and peer mentoring.
This session will share our approach, our findings and the internal challenges and successes that it uncovered.
About
Tracy Playle
CEO and Chief Content StrategistTracy Playle is a consultant content strategist serving primarily working in the HE sector. Before founding her company in 2007, she worked as Head of Research-TV at the University of Warwick (UK). There she was responsible for overseeing the production of over 100 videos showcasing university research to be used by television networks around the world and online. Playle is regarded as leading thinker on content strategy in HE. She speaks at conferences around the world, including events such as the CASE Europe Annual Conference, CASE Asia-Pacific Conference, HighEdWeb, PSEWeb, and Confab. In 2016 she was the opening keynote speaker at ConfabEdu. She has worked with over 160 education institutions in more than 20 countries, is a CASE Crystal Apple Teaching Award winner, and founder of the ContentEd conference, Europe's first content strategy conference for the education sector. In June 2018 she is publishing a book about developing content strategies in HE.
Richard Prowse
Head of DigitalRichard Prowse is Head of Digital at the University of Bath where he leads a multi-disciplinary team of editors, designers and developers responsible for bath.ac.uk. For the past ten years, he has led on digital content efforts at top-ranking English universities. Most recently he has led an ambitious programme to transform the University's digital marketing and communications platforms. Co-founder of Bath's first content meet up, Prowse regularly talks about his experience of adopting an Agile approach to content development, Content Strategy and User Experience design.