Over the last four years Made Smarter’s Organisational Workforce Development team has supported 262 businesses with workforce, skills, and leadership needs.
This includes creating 110 digitally empowered leaders through its Leading Digital Transformation programme, a fast-track three-month course to create digitally informed, empowered leaders, armed with a bespoke digitalisation strategy.
Meanwhile, the Leading Change for Digital Champions programme offers support for those leading change operationally on the shopfloor and is creating a network of digital champions who support each other with shared learning and experience.
How Made Smarter delivers digital empowerment
Our development and delivery of these two key skills programmes is having a huge impact on senior leaders and operations teams.
For instance, leaders are introduced to a broad tool kit that helps them develop a deeper understanding of digital technology tools, how to identify opportunities for using digital tools, and how to leverage these as strategic assets to help shape their strategy for driving their business forward. Importantly they are also gaining insights to the culture in their business and how to foster a culture that enables succesful adoption of digital technology tools.
Digital Champions, meanwhile, are getting a practical toolkit including how to plan their digital project, how to get people on board and how to create a change plan to help them lead people on the shopfloor through changes successfully as they implement digital projects. They are embedding skills like SWOT analysis at all levels of an organisation to help develop and deliver digital projects.
This programme has been supported by Amazon and has offered the opportunity to see best practice applications of technology in an Amazon fulfilment centre. We have also had the support of clients we have worked with to enable our digital champion delegates to see the same technology tools being applied in an SME manufacturing business.
Invest in digital skills for 2024 and beyond
Looking forward to the coming year, we will continue to deliver our Leading Digital Transformation Programme and build on the success of our partnership with Manchester Metropolitan University.
We will also continue to look at opportunities to leverage other partnerships such as the North of England Robotics Innovation Centre (NERIC) at the University of Salford.
We will increase the number of cohorts of our Digital Champions programme and we will continue to build our network of digital champions who support each other gaining and adding to the wealth of knowledge and experience of how digital technology tools are applied in real life situations within manufacturing SMEs.
In the near future we look forward to seeing the return of our succesful Digital Technology Internships programme. The programme previously paired 75 tech-savvy university students with businesses who benefitted from a skills boost the up-to-date knowledge and expertise of the interns.
Almost half of interns secured permanent jobs at the end of their placements. Others benefitted from gaining work experience, which enabled participants to gain employment elsewhere.
I also see opportunities to build on the success of our Fast Track Additive Manufacturing programme, which was run in partnership with Manchester Metropolitan University, by replicating that delivery model to other technologies.
For now, we will continue to empower leaders and digital champions to develop digital skills and to learn from themselves and each other.
To find out more about Made Smarter’s Organisational Development Workforce programmes click here.
