Feedback on the session looking at Training at Connected generation 09

[Tony Cisse]

I will feedback, from my notes from the session but if I have forgotton anything of overlooked an important issue please add your comment.

I explained my interest in facilitating this workshop. LECP is a training provider for the 'Young People's' Sector and is interested in either putting on , collaborating with others and/or publicising relvant training around the use of digital social media and work with young people.

A key issue which was raised was the skills gap between what the technology could and is being used for and how practitioners in the sector are actually using it (or not). A number of training themes came up:

Skills Assessment:
The need for a skills assessment to see which staff have/need which skills is a cruicial part of the process

Awareness Training:
A need was identified for a nu,mber of slightly different takes on awareness training around social media.
- what is social media? / facebook/twitter/bebo etc, how does it work?
- what is the social media function for young people? How does it impact on their lifestyle, liesure activities, career searching etc.
- what are our aims and objectives for wanting to use social media (rationale)
- Training for top managers - what is social media, what are the threats and opportunities, why should should practitioners engage with it. The need to challenge organisational culture, risk perception and access.

Skills training:
- Basic IT/Social media skills (i.e. how does twitter/facebook work)
- Setting up a social network
- safeguarding online
- computor security
- protocols of engaging with young people online
- skills of engaging with young people online

General points:
- There was a need to address organisational culture, both of Manager whose perception is based on risk factors, and IT departments.
- In many settings staff have no access at work (i.e. facebook etc. blocked by IT guidelines, or by managerds guidelines over fear of abuse)
- Is there an issue of being 'licenced' to use social media by employers?
- Workload and time-management. This need to be looked at in order to avoid unmanageble workloads/expectations
- We need to share guidelines and policies where already developed to avoid re-inventing the wheel (i.e. Kent County Council, IBM etc)

In conclusion:
I felt that we could have gone on to develop ,ore around these issues and training needs and might of benefitted from an additional session. Unfortunately due to family commitments I had to leave at lunchtime, but p[lease let us use this forum to continue this dialogue.

Tony Cisse

[Simon Stewart]

Hi Tony, goodsum up of the morning session it was really useful and i'll drop you an e-mail about developing something