Digital training – one year on

It’s coming up to a year since we first updated you on our ambitious plans for digital training in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. This time last year we were about to beta test our first set of digital training modules (11 in total) with volunteers from across the FCO.

To recap – our curriculum was divided into “foundation”, “practitioner” and “expert” level modules in line with the FCO’s new Diplomatic Academy, to make it easier for staff to plan digital into their longer term development. The modules covered the three strands of digital transformation: communications, service delivery and digital in policy making.

The curriculum was created to help deliver an ambitious change agenda across the Foreign and Commonwealth Office – driving cultural change and building digital capability to enable staff to make full use of digital tools, both in policy and comms work and in overseeing digital services.

Earlier this year, my colleague Elizabeth Flinter blogged about the results of our training beta testing and our plans for the future. Since then we’ve been very busy rolling out our curriculum across the office and training up our Regional Digital Units (5 units based in Washington, Singapore, Madrid, Dubai and New Delhi) to deliver training to our embassies and High Commissions.

Members of the Digital Transformation Unit in London also regularly deliver the curriculum to staff in the UK and encouraging the Office to take our e-learning modules. The digital curriculum is now business as usual with scheduled classroom and virtual training every month. Since February we have delivered 76 sessions in London and via our Regional Digital Units with over 450 participants.

Drilling down to our digital communications modules – that translates to 140 of our communications staff trained on producing effective content; 71 trained on running social media accounts and 83 trained on managing digital campaigns.

We regularly review our modules based on evaluation from the participants and facilitators to ensure they are as relevant and up-to-date as possible. We keep a change log so that our Regional Digital Units are aware of any changes. Having one consistent curriculum has been the key to our success and also taken the pressure off the team having to prepare time consuming bespoke training modules for different audiences.

In July 2015 we also ran a pilot of our digital training for FCO senior leaders. The training was scheduled during the FCO’s leadership week to take advantage of all our Ambassadors returning in London. The training consisted of a two hour workshop followed by a two month personalised action plan. We are in the process of evaluating the pilot before we modify and improve our offering. One of the key insights is to ensure leaders who take part are already in their jobs rather than on pre-posting training – they need to be able to practically apply their learning straight away.

It’s also been a busy year delivering training overseas to other governments. Earlier this year I travelled to Yerevan in Armenia to take part in the Diplomatic School of Armenia’s digital diplomacy conference and whilst there delivered social media training to Armenian Government press officers – using our effective digital content module under the somewhat challenging situation of dual translation. And in October we blogged about our training in Kyiv with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

We’ve also recently added to the curriculum with our much in-demand “shooting and editing video on a smartphone” module. This module was developed in-house following demand from London and our Posts to create more video optimised for social media. This has been successfully piloted as both a classroom based course and e-learning module and is now being mainstreamed as part of the central digital curriculum.

As well as constantly improving our existing training offering and evaluating both the training and the improvements to digital communications, services and policy making – we are using this one year milestone to take stock on where we are at with digital training. We are also lucky to have a new digital training officer Liz Hitchcock who will be shaping and improving our digital upskilling plans into 2016.