How we ran a Virtual Skills Week and what we learned from it

In the spirit of transparency and candour, Service Transformation Branch members publish reflections on the what and why for their team.

This post is by Martha Edwards, our former Director of Strategic Design.

At the Service Transformation branch, we aim to help teams in the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy deliver good services by providing them with the support, resources and skills to solve problems. But earlier this year, we asked ourselves the question: what are the skills our teams feel they need? And how can we help build them?

In this blog post, I’m going to talk about how we approached running virtual training, and what we learned from the experience.

Starting with user needs

I’m a user researcher by trade and it’s in my nature to start with research before making any decisions, so we ran a survey asking teams across the ministry what digital topics they wanted to learn more about.

I don’t say this often but …. The results surprised us.

With around 150 responses, we were shocked to learn that the things most people wanted to learn about were not things our branch specializes in (digital delivery, service design and data).

Instead, they wanted to learn how to use Microsoft products like MS Teams, Excel, Planner, Lists, Power Automate, as well as general workplace skills like bringing together hybrid teams. The topics we care most about ranked much lower, with my own discipline of Service Design coming in dead last (womp womp.) Why is this? We hypothesized that people might not have the capacity to learn something new to them so were more interested in finding ways to optimize the tools they are already using.

Our conundrum

Based on the survey results we had two problems:

• People didn’t want to learn about the things we wanted them to learn about
• The things they did want to learn about are things we are not experts in

Nonetheless, we were determined to organize something that was useful to both us and them: training that met their needs while also spreading some learnings around good service delivery at the same time.

Another problem: time. Like many of the things we do, this was a side-of-desk job so we needed to keep it lean and light-touch. So we committed to five sessions over a 1-week period, delivered by a range of public servants who each managed a small portion of content.

How we delivered Virtual Skills Week

Virtual Skills Week took place over the week of June 17 to 21st, and consisted of five 60 or 75-minute sessions. We were nervous about low attendance but those fears proved unfounded — we ended up with over 350 participants across the sessions.

Five sessions wasn’t enough to do useful deep-dives into some of the more complex Microsoft tools, so we made it our aim to deliver intro-level sessions to a variety of topics, while pointing people at additional resources they can access to learn more.

Our sessions were:

• Tips, tricks and essential skills for using MS Teams
• Managing data and information using tools integrated with MS Teams (like lists and planner)
• Sprint success: Building resilient teams and projects with modern agile methods
• Communication skills: How to save time with better emails and deliver impactful presentations
• Mastering meetings and remote dynamics

Side note: If you have a BC Government IDIR, you can access recordings and resources for all sessions (You’ll find our event homepage on the intranet.)

What we learned from this experience

In true agile fashion, we collected feedback and ran a retro after the event to reflect and learn.

The feedback from the event was overwhelmingly positive, minus a few suggestions for improvements on individual sessions. In the survey we conducted, 100% of respondents said sessions were engaging and they learned something new they could apply to their work.

We received comments like this:

“Great event. It would be helpful to have such presentations more often.”

“This session changed my life — no joke. I want to share it with everyone I know.”

But of course there’s always room for improvement — here are some team reflections on these challenges:

• It was a lot of effort to organize
• Our communications, though thorough, were fairly last minute and so felt rushed
• In an effort to de-jargon things, we choose ‘creative’ names, but heard from participants that these were a bit too vague
• We had low engagement on our feedback form
• People had a tendency to drop off when we moved into breakout rooms

Will we run Virtual Skills Week again? Only time will tell, but now that we’ve developed a framework for an event like this, it will be an easier uplift in the future. We will definitely do a few things differently — such as finding more creative ways to get quick feedback, and being more clear on the session names.

We’d love to know: Did you attend Virtual Skills Week? Do you do something similar where you work? Please share your experiences!

The opinions and views expressed in this post are solely the author’s and do not represent those of the Province of British Columbia or any other parties.