At the start of 2020 ProMo-Cymru won a tender to deliver digital skills training sessions for the Vale of Glamorgan’s Creative Rural Communities. We had to dramatically change how we delivered the work during COVID, but the impact of our training went far beyond our initial expectations.

The Creative Rural Vale work with local adult learning training providers, delivering subjects such as painting, sugarcraft, modern foreign language and history.

We originally planned to deliver a series of classroom-based, training courses in social media, web and video. While our first thought was to postpone the training course until we could all be in one room again, it quickly became apparent that, there was now an even more pressing need for digital skills.

We worked quickly to create a whole new scheme of work, designing a comprehensive seven-week course running between May and June.

The course would need to teach everything from the basics of how to join and host a webinar, right through to creating pre-recorded, ‘How To’ tutorial videos and even promoting your webinar on social media.

Tutors, Andrew Collins and Dayana Del Puerto, drew up a course outline to give the group guidance and a clear roadmap of what would be learned but kept enough flexibility to adapt each session to the learner’s needs and any bespoke requests from participants.

However, with so many new skills to learn in such a short space of time, we also decided to add a weekly open Q&A session, allowing participants to ‘drop-in’ with any technical questions they may be having. This extra session not only helped to solidify participants’ knowledge but was also a quieter space for those less confident to ask questions.

As the learners progressed, we continued to adapt our scheme of work to ensure we were covering all the latest changes and improvements to Zoom.

At the end of the course, 91% of participants rated the training as 5/5, and 100% would recommend the course to others. We also received the following feedback:

“I just want to say a BIG thank you to everyone, and I look forward to implementing more of all the skills you have taught to make my online presence both professional, eye catching, fun and wide reaching to a diverse world wide audience.”

“What I thought I knew before is a shadow of the knowledge that has been illuminated by Promo-Cymru’s training.”

“The training hit just the right spot, and I am using this new knowledge in both my teaching and business.”

“An engaging, professional team, with an excellent course, well delivered. I feel so much more confident around the use of tech in general and social media in particular. Thank you.”

“I was fully engaged, it was so interesting. Learning new things is so stimulating and positive. Just what you need right now.”

“Andrew and Dayana, really knew their subjects and were very good at explaining every step. They were approachable and made sure we understood each element as we went along. All sessions were well planned, and the course flowed well. I really appreciated having the extra Q&A sessions in between the training sessions as it gave me a chance to try out what we were taught and get extra help and information as I went along. I learnt so much.”

For more information on our training courses email andrew@promo.cymru