14 | Skills & Education
Campaigning for timber sector education, training and skills development
THE FUTURE OF ONLINE EVENTS
Learn with TRADA Live will be a fixture for the foreseeable future Above: Thousands have attended the webinars
When Learn with TRADA Live first launched in January on the back of a successful regular email series named Learn with TRADA, it was intended to encourage students, recent graduates and the furloughed to continue learning more about timber. Six months later, with more than a thousand registrants across its Learn with TRADA Live webinar programme, and several other successful online events, we believe we have demonstrated the worth of the digital space. Not unlike an in-person event, you can customise an online event to complement its purpose and audience. The different kinds of software and tools now available are also growing, and enable you to emulate the range of experiences too. We’ve incorporated networking ‘Friday Night Pub’ sessions via breakout rooms on Zoom during this year’s virtual university challenge, used a combination of polls, quizzes and surveys, and used live word clouds to collect attendees’ reactions. Learn with TRADA Live – our flagship programme of webinars – is our digital take on a traditional seminar, fleshed out with Q&As. This is a style that has long served TRADA’s ethos around providing a robust foundational layer of knowledge to participants via bite- sized chunks of information; over the years, we have proven we can do seminars, and now webinars, well. We suspect that Learn with TRADA Live has proven so successful because this style of event is unparalleled
at imparting honest, technical content that is not time- sensitive or urgent but is important. People are more called to attend in-person events (which are also often paid-for due to venue and catering costs among others) when there is an urgent imperative, ergo they opt to attend events on topics deemed urgent over important. Consider an all-day, in-person event that is dedicated to learning a specific but important thing. You might anticipate learning this specific thing eventually, but might never get around to it. Learn with TRADA Live breaks that all-day, in-person event into several series of convenient but meaningful webinars, delivered once a month. For TRADA, this enables us to provide a new and empowering offering – and one that we can deliver to members for free due to the minimal costs involved. Yet, for all our success, we remain certain that in-person events will spring back. When you are considering a challenging topic and really want to dig in, a face-to-face event like a conference cannot be beaten. Moreover, the demand will always be there; people crave normal human interaction beyond the constraints of screens, and events aren’t entirely about the learning that comes from the front – from the presenter. It’s about the conversations – conversations you weren’t planning on having – and the table discussions with people you have just met. While Learn with TRADA Live will undoubtedly be a fixture for the foreseeable future, TRADA will also be back out there, meeting our members and industry peers as restrictions lift. ■
FURTHER INFORMATION
Learn with TRADA Live: Fundamentals of timber runs July–December 2021. Find out more about
Learn with TRADA Live and other events at
TRADA.co.uk
Supporting the Confederation of Timber Industries’ (CTI) Skills & Education initiative
TTJ | July/August 2021 |
www.ttjonline.com
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