The challenge:
Industry developed training for college lecturer’s continuous professional development (CPD) can be a challenge when it comes to technical disciplines such as cyber security.
Cyber continues to be a fast-growing and emerging sector, with many educational institutes not having current industry experience and skills within their teaching teams, preventing them from responding to the local demand for courses in this discipline. Our client, a large, multi-site college, required a bespoke CPD programme for their own technology lecturers, primarily focused on cyber essentials, security, protection and ethical hacking.
With industry facing increasing difficulty filling cyber roles, the college wanted to improve and update teaching content by upskilling existing staff quickly in new cyber technologies.
By upskilling their lecturers, the college hoped to offer additional modules to both their full-time 16-to-18-year-old students and to enhance their courses for adults.
Upskilling was seen a preferred solution to recruiting new staff as it is extremely difficult to recruit digital teaching talent, with most candidates who have the necessary industry background having already been in education for some time, meaning they lack recent industry experience and exposure to new technology.
The challenge was how to upskill lecturers in cyber quickly and effectively, when there were no relevant local courses available to train them, and to offer this training on specific dates to align to term time commitments.
The solution:
We worked with the college to identify their specific needs and our industry-experienced team built a bespoke training course which met their requirements.
The training had to take place within non-teaching times and be delivered face to face, while the lecturers, some of whom had been successfully teaching for years and were very tech savvy, had to be convinced of the benefits of the course in addressing gaps in their knowledge they may not have even known they had.
Our team delivered the course to meet all these requirements, and to provide the college instructors with the additional skills and knowledge they needed.
The results:
By upskilling their lecturers, the college was able to expand the courses they had planned to deliver. This is a vital part of their overall strategy as it allows the college to deliver course provision aligned to local and national digital skills gaps.
This works as a virtuous circle by not only providing real social value, but also allowing the college to offer more courses in cyber and other newer technologies.
Feedback on the course was excellent, with comments from lecturers including:
“One of the most insightful courses I’ve been on”
“It was great to get real practical experience”
Outside of the college, the extra knowledge provided to tech teaching staff led to students picking up enhanced skills that they could then take into the working world with them, boosting the numbers of cyber trained talent available to businesses.
Find out more about our reskilling and upskilling solution, or get in touch with one of our experts to talk through your needs.
