During lockdown it quickly became clear that some of the staff who work in ISG could not do their roles from home. In some cases this was true for whole teams, e.g. our staff who manage the library shelves, our staff who work on drop-in help desks, our staff who manage buildings and facilities, our staff who fit AV and IT equipment into teaching rooms.

One of the advantages of working in a large, converged service ( IT, learning technology, libraries, museums and collections together) is that we could take a holistic view and look across the organisation to find new opportunities. In some areas there was new, urgent demand for people. I was in no doubt that we needed many more people to help with the huge shift to hybrid teaching for semester 1, so it simply made sense to re-skill in house. We have converted shelving staff to subtitlers and facilities staff to access facilitators.

Within ISG we decided to find flexibility in our workforce and offer opportunities to re-skill to our staff. In the Learning, Teaching and Web Directorate, we offered 3 roles for colleagues to move into: Learn VLE Assistant, Web Editor and Subtitling Assistant. We offered a job description, training and support for working from home.

The result of this re-organisation and reskilling is that we have 7 colleagues from other parts of ISG now working to do accessibility audits in our VLE,   another 7 adding subtitles to public facing video content and one new web editor. All  of these roles need a high attention to care and detail, accessibility and accuracy. All of these roles bring with them a chance to learn new digital skills and to understand the challenges our diverse groups of students face when they use our online content and the solutions which facilitate better access.

Thank you to the teams in LTW who welcomed and trained our colleagues into these new roles, and thank you to those colleagues who were so willing to add new skills to their repertoire. When the lock down ends and we go back into our libraries and teaching rooms, I am sure we will feel the benefit.

This post can be read in conjunction with this ones which describes how we are growing our own learning technologists, and recruiting more.

re-skilling under lockdown / Melissa Highton by mhighton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA