 So, i gael ystod ymlaen, Regina Everett. Regina yn ddweud yng Nghymru, ac ysgrifennidol Llyfrgell, Archive, Lleirin Gweithgol yma ar y ddiwrnod Llyfrgell East London. Felly, yn fawr o'r rhai ysgrifennidol o Llyfrgell mewn gwirionedd, ymlaen i gynlluniaeth yn y Llyfrgell Llyfrgell, mae'r llyfr ymlaen i'r llyfr ymlaen i gael i gael unrhyw mewn cyfnoddau. Rwyf wedi eu cyfnoddau i gael from the Sconal Report on the experiences of BAME staff members in academic libraries. She's also a member of the British Library Council, a member of the Cilip Trailblazer Group that's developing a standard for level 6 to 7 apprenticeships, and a member of the University of East London Board of Governors. Regina is going to talk today about the University of East London's approach to helping students develop digital skills that will help prepare them for their careers of the future. She's also going to discuss her approach to upskilling library staff members so that they're confident in supporting students. Regina, the floor is yours. Thank you very much. I'm just going to share my screen. OK, so thank you very much. As Valerie pointed out, I'm Regina Everett. I'm a Assistant Chief Operating Officer for Service Excellence and Director of Library, Archives and Learning Services at the University of East London. I'm an African American woman with dreadlocks and wearing a brightly colored top today. So thank you so much for inviting me to take part in this conversation. So the topic today covers a number of strands. So I'm going to focus on the an overview on the approach that we are taking institutionally at the University of East London to upskill our students so that they are digitally proficient. Now, like many comparator teaching and learning institutions, we at the University of East London strive to be the careers led institution. Now, in our case, however, we seek to serve our local communities in East London, as well as their diasporic diasporic communities globally for research and partnerships. Now, the brand positioning of University of East London is tomorrow's 4.0 workforce today. So within Vision 2028, which is the University's strategic roadmap, there is a focus around digital competency and ultimately digital fluency. And so the call to action for our employer partners is look to diversify your talent pool with our students who have the skills and the confidence to take on future careers. So students are the core of the Vision 2028. Now, what do we know about our students at the University of East London? Well, this is a diverse population representing more than 130 countries. It's almost 70 percent black, Asian or minority ethnic. Most of the students are the first in their families to attend University. There's a large population of mature learners returning to education after many years. And like many students, they have responsibilities outside the academy, whether it's caring or working. And of course, we have a growing international student population. So I'm going to focus on three strands of implementation of our strategic objective to develop digitally competent graduates. These are professional professional fitness program support and that's support from peers as well as staff. And of course, staff development. Now, all students at University of East London, including those at our partner institutions, undertake what we call a mental wealth or professional fitness modules at each level to develop those soft skills, which will be required for the unknown jobs of the future. So you see all of these competencies there. And each module within the program will explicitly refer to how these skills apply within the context of the practice. So today, of course, we're focusing on digital skills development, so focusing on the digital proficiency proficiency. So examples of what could take place at each level was certainly at level three and four. Students could use the just capabilities tool or the Sylip professional knowledge, knowledge based and skills based to self assess and to understand their own area of development and then start to use tools like leaked in learning and for self paced learning. And of course, we'll see later that there are other avenues for additional support. Level five can understand how digital skills are needed in their practice, starting to compare approaches, critiquing benefits and drawbacks. For example, students may identify a real world problem, for example, using AI to shortlist applicants for jobs, for example, and then they can discuss the pros and cons of that. At level six, the students could develop a business plan for a digital solution into a problem. And again, they will be using the language and the skills that they acquired in their earlier learning. And then finally at seven, the students can create an innovation and showcase to say partners or our employer partners. And again, students continue to build on their previous knowledge within their practice. For the support element, peer support is a powerful method of supporting students, because students often feel more comfortable asking one another for support rather than asking staff members. So for support with digital skills development at University of East London, we started in 2019, the digital first aid program, where digital first aiders are positioned within schools and the libraries for ad hoc drop ins to answer queries about the use of educational technologies and during the pandemic, they provided online drop in sections as well. Now, the digital first aiders are generally students who are confident in using IT and educational technologies such as Moodle, Turnitin, Cortex, Teams, Office 365, and they are able to assist students in developing their skills. The students are hired through our internal employment agency and one fixed term contracts. Now, beyond the support of the digital first aiders, students, of course, can seek support from the wider library team or their subject specialists within the library team. They can also speak to members of the academic skills team and also their wider academic team. So there are a number of avenues where students can seek support. However, we know that not all academic staff members are confident in using the educational technologies. And so they're not able to model the behavior for the usage of the tools. So. We move on to staff development. So we need to continuously develop our staff members. I mean, as the technology technological landscape is so fast moving, there's a lot to keep abreast of. So certainly over the coming year, our library and archives services team will be developing targeted programs to help academic staff members to optimize their use of the tools so that they can encourage students to use these tools. And then, of course, we'll continue to work with our center for excellence and learning and teaching to help to embed it within within the schools and the school leadership team. We do recognize that the academies can be busy, especially if they're hourly paid lecturers, so there will be that lack of time. So we'll have to to work at how we can build that into staff development programs. Now, for the library staff specifically back in 2019, again, using that still a pksb and the just capability tools, I created my own self assessment tool and I just use survey monkey for this. I just needed to get an understanding of staff competency in their areas that we were focusing on at the time. So these are just some examples of the target areas I wanted staff to give me an indication of how confident they felt in these areas. And then based on their input, I built a training program around the areas for development and I involved our middle management team to help to identify facilitators for the sessions and also to build in a schedule which took place over the period of months, but to work around their sort of workloads. And then after the training, of course, we got feedback from staff members and as ever, many staff members felt confident in using this skill after the session, but there were still some staff members who needed additional support, especially if they weren't using the skills immediately. I'm pleased to say as well that our librarians, particularly really embraced that development program and went further and took the Microsoft Educator certification and again that validated them, how they use the global technology literacy competencies and how they embedded that within within their skills and practice and help them to deliver and develop and deliver online content. So when the pandemic hit, the entire team pivoted fairly seamlessly online. So we were able to transition with, I think, minimal challenge, shall we say? And then we continue to build on that. So again, it's an iterative process, so we're continuing to build on the skills that we've developed to enhance the content that we've developed so far and also to again help our students to really be able to embrace those future creative roles. And so again, as I said, it is rinse and repeat. It is very much an iterative process. And as technology evolves, we can review and evolve our practice. So thank you very much. I'll stop there and stop sharing on my screen. OK, I think we're good there. So thank you very much, Valerie. Thank you very much, Regina. That was really interesting. I've been scribbling away. I've got lots of questions. So again, just to remind people, lots of things that was already some things coming in. So please do add to the questions box with the things that sparked your interesting curiosity. So we move now on to our second speaker, Josie Fraser. So Josie is head of digital policy at the National Lottery Heritage Fund, where she leads on the UK wide digital skills for heritage initiative, which is designed to drive up digital skills and confidence across the heritage sector and to ensure the organisation's benefit from the effective use of technology. So Josie's career has focused on equitable and inclusive digital transformation. She's previously worked for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport as a senior advisor. And in 2017, she was awarded honorary life membership by the Association for Learning Technology in recognition of the impact and scope of her work as an educational technologist, particularly in relation to digital literacy. So Josie is going to talk today about how the National Lottery Heritage Funds Digital Skills for Heritage Initiative and Digital Grantmaking, get all that out in one breath, are supporting and driving professional, organisational and sector-wide digital skills development. And just to note before I hand over to Josie, that she has told us she's going to be sharing lots of links in her presentation. And we know these are quite difficult to note down so that the admin team are going to be sharing these in the chat as Josie's talk proceeds just to make it a little bit easier for you to listen to what she's saying. So on that note, delighted to welcome Josie Fraser. Thank you so much, Balmy, and thank you for that lovely introduction. Absolutely delighted to be here today. I am a middle aged white woman and I have a blonde bob hairstyle and be remiss of me, not to mention I have some beautiful, fresh sunflowers in the background of my room very fortunately at the moment. OK, I'm going to quickly get into the video. And this is going to be a reasonably pacy gallop through a number of things I want to cover and share with you today. I'm going to talk about the National Lottery Heritage Fund's Digital Skills for Heritage Initiative. No surprises there. It's our huge digital skills programme. I'm going to, as as Valerie indicated, I'm going to share loads of resources with you today, all of which are freely available, openly licensed. Please, please do make use of them. Please share them with people that you think they'll be of use to. Enjoy them and help us promote them. And then I'm going to talk a little bit about ad dash benchmarking survey which we've which we've commissioned for the last two years, which is really important, useful piece of research to anybody interested in digital skills in the glam sector or the broader heritage sector. So I'm from the National Lottery Heritage Fund. For those of you who haven't worked with us before, please do have a look at our website and see whether we may be able to support you in the future with the UK's largest funder of heritage projects. That includes the glam sector, but it also includes the wider heritage sector. So we also support many, many land land and nature projects. For example, we look at cultural heritage, community heritage and memories, a whole whole range of different areas as well. And the Digital Skills for Heritage Program is designed to support the sector as a whole because as a distributor of national lottery funds, we have we work to a framework of practice and one of the priorities within our framework is to indeed support the sector in developing digital skills and competencies. Mainly what I've been working on for the last two years since I've been with the organisation. So digital skills for heritage programme launched Feb 2020. So just before we went into the pandemic and it's blossomed through the pandemic, as you can imagine, we were able to provide a lot of timely support for lots of organisations. And it's now a three point six million initiative. We had to pivot online. So the initially the activities were planned to take place. A lot of them were kind of face to face type workshops and events and activities. Everything moved online for the majority of the project. And in this our final year, we are starting now to move back into kind of physical spaces as well. So the projects provide lots and lots of different things. The diversity of the initiative is really designed to match the diversity of the sector and the needs of the sectors that we're working with. But you focus on these kind of five key areas, which are sector wide digital skills training, dedicated mentoring and support. So that's really focusing on the very low confidence organisations that might be completely new to digital. We do a chunk of support for business and development and leadership work. So really focusing on those kind of strategic aims and bringing along digital leaders within the sector. We've got a whole big focus on research and online learning that I'm going to talk to a little bit more in a sec. And we also we've just recently established exemplar cohort projects and we have two of those. One of them is really well, the base is super interesting. Our newest one is looking at how organisations can make use of digital volunteers to build their own capacity and obviously rethink their kind of models in terms of how they work and how they get support. Yn the. The program has has done a huge amount in terms of contact time and providing training, support, boot camps for individuals and organisations. It's also generated thousands of learning resources, really great ones. These include a bunch of key sector guides that look at safeguarding issues and any safety issues, look at things like GDPR and security issues, data management. Online learning was a super popular topic when we went into lockdown with lots of organisations wanting to know a little bit more about online pedagogies and practices and accessibility is another key one. And also we've done quite a lot of work around working with open licenses. What I'd really like to flag though as well, if you haven't seen it yet, is we have a brand new, huge online learning centre, the Digital Heritage Hub. And within that there are lots and lots of very short, bite-sized courses answering these hundreds of digital questions around these four topics, engagement, content, leadership and planning. Please do take a look at that because there's some great content in there. Dash Survey is the first ever UK wide benchmark of heritage sector digital skills. That was carried out for the first time in 2020. And thousands of volunteers, employees, senior leaders and freelancers have taken part in that in both years, but in our recent year in 2021, which we reported on. So the report didn't come in until January. And there are some great opportunities identified in that. I'm going to just give you my highlights. Please again, do go and have a look at some really, really useful data and information in there, but headline things that are really important in terms of people thinking about skills in the sector are the sector is positive and motivated, and that's obviously really important. And the survey team identified the presence of what they call digital enthusiasts, so people who are keen to learn to do new things using digital solutions problems across all types of roles across the sector. So we're characteristically a positive sector about digital skills. Digital business critical skills did improve over the sector over the last couple of years, not a huge surprise to anyone given the pandemic and given the online pivots that took place and the huge push for everybody to develop those skills. There was a positive correlation between participation or engagement in our initiative and increased skills, which was great news for us. Senior leaders had to focus on immediate rather than strategic innovative use of digital, again, no surprise to anyone, although lots of signs that senior leaders are very keen to build on foundations developed during the pandemic. And really also to point out one of the findings was that there's lots of potential swings for looking at HR processes and recruitment in terms of building digital skills at organisational level. The sector shared with us their top three priorities for the next year, and we're working kind of across the programme still for the next year to support and meet those needs. Please do take a look at our main sites. Please do sign up for our newsletters. There's many opportunities coming over the next year and obviously a huge wealth of material for you also to explore. And I will finish there. Thanks very much for the time. Thanks very much, Josie. That was excellent to be getting some comments in the chat saying that someone saying they love the idea of a digital enthusiast. And someone saying, wow, this is rich. So that's obviously gone down very well. So thank you very much for that. So we now turn to our third and final speaker, last but very much not least, is Alec Ward. And Alec is a digital skills manager at Culture24 and his career has focused on building capacity and confidence for smaller cultural organisations. We've got many of those here. So I know there'll be particular interest in that by providing digital skills and literacy support. Alex has got extensive experience designing, training around practical digital skills development from video editing to creating 3D digital models and focuses that training through a wider organisational strategic context. So today Alex is going to be discussing why it's necessary for the heritage organisations to understand digital maturity and the digital skills of staff, also the role that leadership can play in that process and the part that change makers within the organisation can play. So really interesting presentation coming up. Alec, I'll pass to you. Thanks very much. Very much, Valerie, for that lovely introduction. Hello, everyone. I'm just going to share my screen quickly and hopefully you can see my slide. So hello all, I'm Alec. I'm a white male in his early thirties. I've got dark brown hair. I've got brown eyes. I've got a stubbly beard with a slightly thick and moustache, which some of my say is slightly inspired by the recent top young movies and there's also a day of the Trifid style rubber plant creeping up behind me. And I'm the digital manager, a digital skills manager at Codra 24. We've been considering the roles of digital skills and literacy within the sector for some time. We see digital skills as being about people, the individual or the group and not about technology on its side, because technology is ever changing. The importance of the people using that technology, that remains the same. Now, how do they use it? How do they understand it? Those sorts of questions. And all of this is very much linked to digital maturity. How do the organisations that we work for use digital tools and technologies and how do our organisations support the people within them to do that work? So I want to start off by highlighting how the digital skills of the people working within your organisation are sort of intrinsically linked to the digital maturity of those organisations, because digital is very much people centred and digital maturity is about the culture of an organisation as much as it is about technology itself. And the challenge, of course, is sort of knowing how to build the necessary skills and how to develop the maturity of our organisations. And I can't answer that in 10 minutes, but I can at least point you in the right direction and give you a few things to think about as you sort of start that journey. So as a founding partner in the University of Leicester's one by one project, we've spent the last five years or so developing, testing and iterating our ideas around digital and from that we've developed a number of framings centred around digital skills. And you can see one of those framings on the slide there, the triangle, and it breaks down the three different and distinct elements of digital skills and our competencies, capabilities and our literacies. And breaking down those skills using this framing is a practical activity that you can do yourself or with your teams. And I've popped a bit link on the screen there to a guide on how to use this framing and I'm not going to go into detail now on how it works, but if you're interested, it's a very detailed guide and it will tell you how to sort of break down your own skills using it. And it's important to know that it's not necessary for everyone to have all of these digital skills at the same time across all activities, but it is important for all three areas to be covered across an organisation. And that's when we start getting into the realms of digital maturity. And but before we start talking about digital maturity of our organisations, I just wanted to highlight a few things worth thinking about when we're considering our digital skills. So as Josie and Regina have already mentioned, most organisations will have a sort of digital champion or agents of change. And the people who drive digital change from within and these people, they usually have strong digital skills and they often act as bridges across the organisation to sort of bolster the skills of others. And that this work is often unseen, it's often unstructured and it usually takes a lot of sort of emotional labour and from the individuals involved. So we want to make sure that we are identifying and supporting these individuals so that their work doesn't go unseen. You know, we want to take some of the weight off of their shoulders and prioritise their work organisationally and give them space and time to develop. And then on the other side of the coin, you have your organisational leaders, you know, you're senior managers, directors, trustees, how digitally literate are these individuals? Now, we've been supporting leaders with digital for a number of years most recently through our National Lottery Heritage funded early in the sector programme and we've learnt that whilst leaders may not necessarily be the people doing the digital stuff and they do need to build their own digital literacy to a point where they can create the conditions for change and sort of value skills development internally and understand the strategic benefits of digital maturity. And as Josie said in her presentation, the last few years, digital interventions, they've been much more reactive and but now's the time to make sure that these are more strategic. And then finally, how can you as a leader or as a champion or a change maker support digital skills sharing and development? The best place to start is to look for the sector for advice and inspiration. Regina just gave an excellent example of identifying and prioritising digital skills within an organisation. By outside of direct case studies, culture 24, we've got a free to access digital pathways resource bank. You already heard Josie talking about all of the fantastic resources that the National Lottery Heritage Fund has through their digital skills for heritage programme. Arts Council England has the digital culture network. National Archives has plugged in, powered up. I think you sort of get the picture that there's a lot of support out there. But the key is finding the right support at the right time. And doing that takes a bit of awareness around what's available in the sector. And so I always suggest joining networks and communities of practice and like the museum's computer group as an example of the digital learning network so that you can keep in touch with what's going on. And building digital skills is about building confidence. It's about confidence in what you know, you know, as well as in the fact that you don't know everything and that that is very much OK. But it's also important that we have confidence in not just ourselves, but in our organisations as well and that they'll have the maturity to adapt and thrive in the constantly changing digital landscape. And that is what organisational digital maturity is all about. It's about the resilience, capacity and ability of an organisation to respond to changing technologies, audience, behaviours, culture, platforms, tools. There's a few ways that we can measure our digital maturity and one of the tools that we can use is the digital culture compass, which was commissioned by a national heritage fund in the Arts Council and developed by a number of stakeholders, including ourselves at culture 24. And the digital culture compass looks at digital maturity within the context of 12 activity areas from HR to collections management. And through this tool, you can assess your digital maturity in each of these activity areas. And it helps to sort of build up an overall picture of organisational maturity. And it also lets you set benchmarks for future targets. And when it comes to the relationship with digital skills, when we think about that skills triangle, you've got the digital literacy at the top and the competency and the capabilities at the bottom. We want to make sure that our organisation has an even spread of capabilities, competencies and literacies in the right place at the right time. So I do recommend checking out the digital culture compass because it's a great starting point, but there are other maturity indexes available. So what should we be thinking about when we're thinking about our digital maturity and we want to be thinking about where digital sits within our organisation, what kind of model you use, you know, is the responsibility for digital dispersed across your organisation or is there a central department which acts as a hub for those activities? And then we also want to consider how this model sort of impacts the people that do that work. And then however you use digital tools, platforms, technologies, wherever it's based, it's important that it supports your organisational strategy. Now, what are you trying to achieve as an organisation? What are your aims, objectives, goals and where does digital fit within all of that? A digitally mature organisation would see digital as a tool to help them achieve their strategy. And then linked to that strategic approach is the necessity to assess those various activities and review them against the strategy to see how effective they are in achieving it. Digital is more than just IT and it's more than just marketing and communications. It's used across every aspect of our organisations daily. So it's important that we understand and assess how effective it is in achieving what we want to achieve. Finally, I just wanted to wrap up with by drawing your attention to a new guide that we worked on with the European Digital Transformation Task Force, because it's very much relevant to what we're talking about today. The guide offers three key recommendations to help frame an approach to digital transformation and for the whole of the culture sector in Europe. But these recommendations are really relevant to all aspects of digital and from skills to maturity. So the first thing that we talk about is sharing a common language and approach within your organisation to all aspects of digital because this very much helps bring people together to understand challenges, align objectives and understand and build capacity. We want to make sure that people are at the very centre of what we're doing. Secondly, positive change that supports digital capacity building is much more effective when it happens in a people centre way and looking at holistically at everyone's needs, everyone's roles from volunteers to senior leaders, as well as the communities and the audiences that we serve. And then finally, thinking about purpose and values. You know, most fundamentally that the culture cultural heritage sector needs to build digital capacity in order and understanding in order to be more resilient and to remain relevant and thrive in the 21st century. And this very much means about making an impact and a difference to the people who visit and use our services. So it needs to be driven by organisational mission purpose values, just like everything else within our services. And you'll notice that these recommendations, much like everything else that I've highlighted today are about, aren't about technology. It's about our approach to technology as individuals, as organisations and what that means for our audiences and our communities. So on the screen there, there's some suggestions for further resources and there's a bitly link and a QR code which you can scan with your phone if you'd like, and that takes you to a Google Doc, which has links out to all of these and a few more. And just to say that there's lots of ways that we can develop our own digital skills, the skills of our colleagues and the maturity of our organisations. And with these things never happen effectively or successfully in a silo. So, you know, think about the language that you're using. Start a conversation with your colleagues today and use that shared language. Talk openly about your digital skills and the maturity of your organisation. Now, think about your own direction. Are you sort of open to learning and collaboration? Where do you want to go with your digital skills? But also think about the the direction of your organisation. You know, is it moving in the right direction or is it is it struggling? Is it going to be left behind? So, thanks very much for listening. I hope that I've given you a few things to think about and a few places to start answering some of those questions and more than happy to answer any questions in the Q&A or you can drop me an email, send me a tweet. Thank you very much, Alec. And can I invite you to stay online and also invite Regina and Josie just to turn their microphones and cameras back on so that we can move into the Q&A part of the session? So I'll wait till that happens. Let's see. I've got a view when I can't see anyone yet. Oh, there we go. That's better. Can I actually see you all just a positive move? So thanks very much for those loads of stuff coming in the chat about how positively all of all three of those presentations have been received and lots of questions coming in. But I'm going to use the chair's privilege to start. So, Regina, you talked quite specifically about this, so I'm going to start with you and then move to the others. What do you mean? We've talked about digital skills. What do you mean by by digital skills and do you think there's a common understanding of what that means and does that matter? Regina, I'll go to you as I say first on that one, because you have your in your presentation quite a specific list of competencies and skills. Yeah, I mean, I do agree that it is it is quite broad. You know, and again, as an information specialist, I always want to have that information literacy in there as well so that people can critically analyze the information that they manage to retrieve, but it does range from everything from just being able to use within my higher education landscape, the educational technologies and exploit exploit that so that you can enhance your learning. But it also from an organizational context, just looking at how you run your business, you know, how efficient, efficient you can make your processes using technology. So it's kind of a range of things. But I think if one wanted to be really reductive is is the non physical. So but that's why I say it becomes very, very broad when we're speaking about digital landscape. Thank you very much. I'll go to Josie next and then to Alex. Josie, your thoughts on what it is. Thanks for the question. I liked Alex's approach to the pyramid with digital literacy and capability and confidence on the top as a way of kind of approaching skills. I thought that was useful. My background is in educational technology and I'm very, very familiar with working with digital maturity frameworks and kind of thinking about digital literacy and what that means in different sectors. So kind of my I think there's some amazing frameworks out there to help organizations. I also think that what digital skills are is quite site specific. The dash survey goes a step further and says it's role specific. So have a look at kind of how they chop it up. But for me, I always tend to slice the pie in three ways. One basic digital literacy, which is literally the functional things that everybody needs to just do to be a part of a digital society. And without which there is digital exclusion. So that's things like sending emails online banking. And these are things that many of us take absolutely for granted, but actually skills profiles still vary across different organizations in different places. So we shouldn't be taking those things for granted. But for me, that's the kind of the really fundamental layer. The next layer for me would be around the kind of specific and the specific and somewhat specialist items for a professional role. So for the gam sector, that's going to be a lot to do with things like understanding online accessibility, understanding data management in terms of your legal responsibilities, understanding open licensing. These are all kind of critical elements that we'll put across the types of specialist use that you're going to make of technologies, whether you're digitising things or whether you're sending out comms or whether you're looking at linking your digital investment to your organisational strategy. You still need those higher specialist level skills, I think. And then the final level is things that not everybody in the organisation is going to need to know or will find useful, but they are very specific to the glam professions. And they come along with lots of software and processes and hardware that are specific a lot of the time to our sector and the kinds of processes like biodiversity data or working with 3D digitisation or whatever those kinds of things may be. And obviously any organisation really needs to make sure that they have got the fundamentals in place and then my advice would be to really look at raising that middle level and understanding how your organisation is coping with that. Thanks, that's really interesting and useful, Alec. Yeah, I mean, I totally agree with both what Regina and Josie have said, you know, when it comes to digital skills, you can't be prescriptive because digital changes all the time, the things that people need to know today, they might not need to know in a month's time or there might be something completely new, which is why we took the approach with the skills framing, the triangle thinking about electricity's capabilities and competencies. And because that doesn't talk about the technology or the platform, it talks about your approach and to the thing that you're doing, to the activity that you're doing. So just to give like a non-digital example of how it would work, your competency would be your ability to use a hammer, wood and nails. For instance, your understanding of those tools, your capability would be your ability to use those materials to hammer, wood and nails to build something like to build a chair, for instance. And then your literacy would be your ability to take a step back and to look at the chair you've built and think to yourself, actually, we wanted more people to be able to sit on this, we should have built a bench. And that's what that triangle is about. It's about taking that sort of holistic look at the skills that you and your organisation have and making sure that you've got the right people in the right place at the right time. Excellent. We've got loads to follow up there, but there are lots of questions coming in and I want to make sure I cover some of the ones from you, which is not just my own. So first up, we've got one specifically for Regina, someone who said an excellent presentation. Thank you very much and great to hear how you've been supporting staff. So the person you're asking the question has asked if you could speak a little bit more about any provisions and support for students and also staff with access accessibility issues, and that might be disabilities, socioeconomic issues or anything else, or if you if you've got plans to do that, so could we come to you specifically on that one, Regina? Yes, I mean, so again, we've got sort of, you know, sort of resources and technologies specifically for, you know, sort of users who may have different disabilities. We've got a disability support unit where students can get support, but we also periodically will have someone who does drop-ins to help the students really to get get the most out of their sort of digital assistive technologies. Again, you know, there's, you know, sort of institution level sort of training so that we can, you know, just test what, you know, understand what additional needs that we should be considering. And we also have students or students are our biggest, biggest advocates. For example, in one of our libraries, we had a group of students that, you know, gave us a lot of feedback about the spaces that we identified and used for assistive technology. So we tried to co-create with students within that space. So the aim really is to not to have it segregated, to always have it as a prism that we look through when we're looking at any skills development. But again, always, you know, looking to our students to give us additional feedback on areas where we may have, you know, we need to improve. Yeah, I mean, I loved, again, we probably don't have time to follow it up. I love the digital first-aiders and also the kind of reverse mentoring and the staff and student interaction and your kind of circle at the end, which I thought was lovely. So we may, if we've got time, I'll come back to that. But I've got loads in there from other people. So I'll carry on with those to be fair to the audience. So somebody has asked about infrastructure. Do we have the infrastructure? Obviously, we know that particularly during COVID, there's been a huge sort of explosion of demand and provision online. I'm particularly, again, each of you can speak to that in your different skill areas. So do we have the infrastructure to meet emerging demand in the digital landscape? I'll come to you, Alec, first, and perhaps particularly that might be relevant to your work with smaller institutions. The answer is yes and no and everything in between. It really depends on the organisation. As a sector, we're getting better, but I think the pandemic very much highlighted that there's a lot of organisations that do not have the infrastructure to do the digital things that they need to do. The key for me is it comes back to that question on digital maturity and it's about understanding where you need to prioritise your resources. Over the last two years, a lot of heritage organisations and glam organisations, they jumped into digital posting content, creating lots of really exciting digital experiences and then very quickly realise that actually they don't have the capacity to maintain and manage these things. And some of it was very good and some of it was not so good. And for me, the key is thinking about your digital maturity, thinking about your activity areas and understanding what you're trying to achieve as an organisation and focusing your resources to do those things. It's perfectly fine to not be all singing or dancing on social media if you can focus your resources and have an excellent website that people can come to there and get that information. So, again, it's about priorities and prioritising effectively. Thank you, Josa. I'm going to go to you next on this. This is a great question. I love this question because for me, skills is one part of the puzzle. And I think it's really, really important that we don't think, oh, you know what, all we need to do is give skills to our staff and everything is going to be perfect because it's not going to be. Not every organisation can support every possible digital skill, nor should they have to and lots of organisations that we see are overburdened with things that could be done much better at scale anyway. So the kind of the digital ecosystem that supports the sector is really, really important. It's immature at the moment. However, there are some great organisations providing really vital services and doing bits of things for people. I would love to see many more of those services emerge. I think the towards a national collection work is doing some great job in identifying where those service gaps currently lie. It has to be something that we as a country, as the UK are supporting rather than pushing back on to individual organisations and because we're just then we're overburdening people, we're missing economies of scale and we're driving down quality sometimes rather than driving it up. It's really interesting. Regina, your thoughts. I mean, absolutely echo that, you know, shared services is definitely part of the equation. Of course, each institution within a higher education context will want their own USP. There's never enough money. Let's face it. And the challenge within higher education institutions is that you're looking at a couple of different sort of areas. You're looking at sort of the running it as a business process, but also you want to have a sort of a sandpit environment because you're trying to challenge your students to think toward the future. And they need the tools to be able to do that. And they need the space to be able to do that. I'm glad that we've moved away from the old sort of MIS. Oh, my God, we can't allow students to have certain activities that will, you know, impact the firewall. Thankfully, we pretty much moved away from that. But again, you know, as I said, there's always, you know, there's never enough money to do all the things you want to do. That's really, really interesting and sadly accurate. So I'm going to stick with you, Regina, because it's one that's come in around upskilling and the kind of consequences of that, which I'm going to start with you on. So Neil has asked one sensitivity for organisations. Obviously, if you do upskill your staff, they can become a flight risk because with these newly found brilliant skills they have, they can go off and possibly earn loads of money elsewhere. What can be done to mitigate that if an institution or a skills programme has has invested so much in in individuals and then and then they leave because because you've made them so much more skilled and therefore valuable. So I'll start with you, Regina, on that one. Well, I will, from a personal perspective, I welcome that. That's I welcome the fact that we've developed individuals who feel so confident that they want to sort of go and spread their wings. So, but I realise that, you know, that does impact organisational resilience. But also it opens opportunities for other people who might be developing because let's face it within libraries in particular. You oftentimes will have very low attrition. Let's talk about the people with the digital skills that you have. Those are the people that we worry about and where we're based, they all go to Canary Wharf or, you know, they will, you know, may say, listen, I'm never going to come into the office. So if you can't allow me to work from home, I will never work there. And that I think that's the challenge. That is why having different modes of ways to be able to get people into roles, you know, using our student population within the higher education context, to sort of develop them and maybe give them initial starts and roles. We just have to be a lot more creative about where we get people and also having an environment where people might want to stick around for a while. And understanding from staff members what it would take to do that. For some staff members, the thing that they need is to move on and I certainly celebrate that. But, you know, where I can have the conversation before someone leaves, is there anything that I could do differently that would make you interested in staying? Then I'm happy to have that conversation. That's a really, really important point. I'm going to come to you, Josie, next on that one. I think progression routes are really important because of where we are, kind of in the in terms of digital maturity as a sector. The progression routes are potentially not always there for individuals and they are having to transfer out to move up in their careers. And I think no no manager who's worth their salt would would be upset that people get better and want to move up. That's literally, you know, the sign that you've done a good job being a manager, that they're achieving and that they're interested in what they do. I think there is a there is obviously from the point of view of an organisation, it's very difficult. If you're losing stuff and you're having to take time to recruit, but, you know, I think it's definitely one that we need to think about collectively and think about as a sector and where we're developing and moving people around as a whole sector. You know, and maybe this is a really, really important area where we don't just talk to ourselves, where we do connect with other similar organisations and networks and think about those routes in and out for people so that we can make sure that as a sector, as a whole, we're upskilling in terms of digital. Yeah, and to pick up on what Regina said as well, presumably if we all work together, kind of co-operatively, people might, even though people might move on, you might gain yourself from the skills from being an attractive employer or a higher education institution from someone else's so that they'll be a kind of mutual benefit. So you might lose bounce, but you'll gain in other places. So, yeah, hopefully there's a bit of that, Alec, and your thoughts on that one. To be honest, I haven't got a huge amount to add because Josie and Regina covered it very well. I think the only thing I would say is that there are things that you can do to sort of look at embedding skills within organisations to sort of try and share the skills and expertise that some individuals might have with with other members of staff and something that you could look to. But, you know, it's not always effective, not always efficient, and it can also be quite a large burden on the people that do have those skills to sort of actively share them. And then sort of just to open it up, one issue that I see a lot for smaller organisations is the sort of rely on some volunteers to bring in the digital skills that they need for their organisations that they don't have in sort of permanent and paid staff. Again, I'm not going to answer for that, but it's almost like a whole other can of worms, you know, the sort of reliance on volunteer work for these sorts of tasks and skill sets. I'm going to stay with you, Alec, because actually we've had a question from Herbert in which is kind of an allegor to that sort of links to that. So he's actually asked Regina, so I'll come to you after I've spoken to Alec around how do we help people who don't have access to kind of IT at all, you know, so that the issue of IT poverty, which is kind of linked to the volunteers, you know, so obviously if you're a student or a member of staff, there will be a certain infrastructure we talked about infrastructure, but what about people who have, you know, and again, you know, Josie talked about this with the kind of foundational levels and then moving up, what about IT poverty? People who have the sort of digital exclusion issue if we like, which links to your volunteers. So Alec, I'll start with you and then move to Regina and Josie on that one. Yeah, that's that's a very difficult question to ask in the sense that it's a sort of myriad of things, isn't it? It's, you know, something that organisations can potentially provide if they have the sort of capacity and the resources to do so, but not every organisation does. It's something that perhaps, you know, government should be looking into. The sort of the digital divide is a big issue for society in general. Not just within this sector, but wider sectors too. And I guess that as an organisation that the one thing that you could do if you don't have the resources is to at the very least look for charities or organisations that may have the resources to help support these people. You know, quite often libraries, for instance, will give out free hotspots, free 4G hotspots that people can use to connect to the internet with and they can borrow them for a month and have a sort of stable internet connection from those. So that there are sort of initiatives out there. It's just a bit of a challenge to sort of get it all in one place so that that people can use it effectively. Thank you, Regina. I'm going to come to you next on that one. Yeah, I mean, our IT director, poor woman, she became Amazon at one point, just getting laptops and, you know, sort of, you know, sort of what is it, dongles out to people during the pandemic. So that's the first thing that was done for both staff and students. And I will say that the university did end up having a central pot, so we didn't have to, from our services, come up with the funding for that. So we we there were some things that we were able to redirect so that we can put together an institutional pot for staff and students. The other thing is that we were, you know, very quick as soon as we were able to some restrictions were lifted. We got those buildings open again for those people who needed to come in because it's all well and good me giving you a laptop and a dongle. But if you're in a one bedroom flat with, you know, four family members old, you know, sort of needing to use the space is challenging. So that's why keeping the libraries open. That's why supporting our local libraries was so ever so important. And that's why we don't want to see them disappear because people do rely on going to those spaces to get had space to do work. So, I mean, you know, so those were two of the the key quick, quick areas that we were able to support both staff and students. Brilliant. Thanks very much. Josie, when they come to you on that one, I'll answer it very quickly. I think, yes, it needs to be much more of a national priority in terms of other countries approach the the issue differently in the some great international examples of ways that we can kind of support everybody in getting online. But the other thing I would say is that actually the UK is amazing organisations working in this area who have done lots of research that are very active, that are great. So if it is an area that you're concerned about, which we all should be, look at their research, look at whether there's opportunities to partner with them because there's some great people with a lot of knowledge already that we don't have to, as a sector, just find all these things out for ourselves. There's lots of work going on. And then the third point is absolutely Regina's point, support your local library, support libraries nationally, support the library service. They are there something we cannot afford to lose that has been corroded over the last decade or so. You know, if you care about the digital divide and access to knowledge and information, do stuff for libraries, whatever it is, just do something for libraries. Thank you. I'm going to stay with you, Josie, because somebody's put a question up asking about qualifications and their sort of link to skills. So we each of you has a different and interesting perspective on this, particularly when we were talking in part of the conversation earlier about being able to transfer those skills. How much does that develop on having a certificate? Something that usually I have done this, I've got this qualification, whatever. So the person has asked how much the skills come from qualifications and is it therefore fair to have professional qualifications as a requirement in job descriptions? So I mean, you could broaden the question if you like, but as to how much I mean, each of you provides skills in your own particular context, do you have something that people can take with them, like a certificate or a kind of name that they have achieved? Because often if you don't, and it's all right saying, I know I've done a course in this where people do want a thing. Often if an employer will want a kind of piece of paper. So what's your what's your kind of attitude and thoughts around that? Or, you know, or whether that becomes part of the digital divide? Josie, I'll stay with you since you have the camera. So I'll speak from the point of being quite old. When I came into working technology, there wasn't the qualifications. There wasn't anything to do. You know, it was literally spend a lot of time online. Have a go at some HTML. It was literally around there. And, you know, I based my career on that and, you know, I've carried on learning informally as I've gone. So it's, you know, I think and there's lots of people that I really rate in terms of the consultants, in terms of sector professionals that don't have direct formal qualifications, but obviously have huge, huge experience in terms of formal qualifications. I think, you know, obviously very, very supportive of them. And they provide structure and they provide experience and they do provide the kind of record, the formal recognition that is valuable. However, you know, there is a move in some circles in terms of HR away from just requiring formal qualifications because experiences are valuable in some or many cases as qualifications. So I think I've just seen in the chat somebody said some job avas, still ask for ECDL. Not to be mean, but I think that that's not a good sign. If you see it as a requirement. So I think it's always going to be a mix. There are going to be qualifications now. So, for example, you can take lots of different types of qualifications in being an educational technologist that weren't around when I set out. And they're great, you know, and I would encourage people to take advantage to the fact that they're there. Things are always going to change. Things are always going to develop. I'll stop there because I'm sure as people have opinions on that. Regina, I'm going to go to you next on that one. Well, I mean, again, and again, it goes back to that, you know, so it depends what the role is. I mean, obviously, if I'm, you know, hire you to do Python and you've not got a clue and we do a test of some sort. I'm sorry, you won't get the job. But there are ways, you know, again, you know, within within libraries, you know, some of the work that our digital first daters are doing, providing that frontline support, that is absolutely transferable and that is absolutely sort of job experience that they can take with them to to their next role and it doesn't have to be linked to a specific, you know, sort of qualification. But again, I think it really does depend on what they do and what level of knowledge and experience we need for that role. Great. Thank you. I think that's that's an excellent point. Alec, come to you on that. Yeah, just agree entirely with what Regina and Josie have said. The sort of from my personal experience, I don't have any sort of formal qualifications outside of a couple degrees in history and museum studies. So that's, you know, not overly related to to digital in any way. And all of the skills that I've sort of learned and that I teach and coach around. I've sort of developed over time, you know, through personal experience, through hobbies and also through my work. And I probably, you know, wouldn't have got to the role that I'm in now, had organisations asked for, you know, qualifications. And I think it very much does speak back to that sort of digital divide, you know, the fact that there's going to be people who don't have access to things that that they need to be able to do the roles that they could easily do, you know, in a developmental position as they sort of like build up the skills that they need and that they have. And, you know, the sector that we work in very much does perpetuate that that idea that there's a need for qualification. And that is changing. But I personally don't think there is a necessity for it. OK, and we're running out of, we have slightly run out of time and we're told we can run a few minutes over. So there are still, unfortunately, a few questions in the Q&A that we're not going to get round to. There are some specific ones which people might might wish to pick up outside the conversation, but I wanted to end by asking each of you and I'm going to I'm going to go, Alec, Josie or Jada. So you've got time to think about about change because you've all been really kind of active, conscious pioneers of change in your own context, in a really successful and kind of incredibly impressive and a brilliant way. And I wanted to finish by asking you kind of was that a conscious thing and what can other people do to kind of emulate that kind of like ability to just say I'm going to I'm going to do something. I'm going to make a change and you've all you've all done it in an incredibly impressive way. So Alec, I'll start with you first. Yeah, well coach 24, we very much approach everything that we do from a from a position of experimentation. The idea that what we're trying out is an experiment and we'll do it and learn from it and then we'll sort of iterate based on the results. And I think that very much comes from from a willingness to change and to be open to change and and digital and technology is ever changing. So if you're not in a position that you can change or that you're open to change, then there's a good chance you're going to be sort of stuck in the mud, I guess. Thank you, Josie. And personally, I'm really driven to help people do things better and to get better public value. And at this historical point in time, digital transformation offers so many opportunities for organisations to reach more people to get kind of better social inclusion and just to kind of have fairer organisations and practices. So I've been on the edge of that for that reason. In terms of change, I'd really say, you know, as well, it's it's it's four percent technology and it's 90 percent psychology. People don't really like change. And, you know, I think a thing if you if you're wanting change, lasting change has to be really interested in people and helping them kind of transition three things, because maybe the three of us may not be typical of lots of people, even though I myself very often find change a bit painful as well. Thank you. That's really insightful. Thank you, Regina. We're going to come to you finally. Well, typical sort of librarian, lifelong learner, curious. So watching my son, who's in his early 20s and the nieces who are sort of 12 and 13, how they consume information just fascinates me. And so it just tells us what we can see coming down the pike in the age sector. And we've got to be ready to address it.