In its first four months, 18F Education, has developed customized trainings for a number of agency partners, which cover topics such as agile, Github, and how to better integrate emerging technologies and research into daily practices. Many of these themes, along with the work happening in DigitalGov University and DigitalGov.gov, align with the government-wide needs identified above.
These customized trainings start off with a significant amount of assessment and tailoring of existing materials to fit the customer’s need, followed by a series of multi-week, in-person trainings. Unfortunately, staff limitations make it difficult to:
- fulfill the current demand for customized training received,
- proactively seek out new business opportunities, or
- proactively create course materials that could be easily adapted to the needs of different agencies.
There is a tremendous opportunity to create more robust revenue streams with relatively little up-front investment.
With the above constraints in mind, we — the research team — have some recommendations of where TTS Education can focus its efforts within the next three months to maximize their effects.
Our research discovered that the need for education around practices such as agile development, product ownership, human centered design, and other digital practices is so great we can probably start anywhere and feel pretty confident there will be a demand for it. Perhaps the better question is, which among these topics can TTS cover best?
In areas where the need seems both obvious and great, the best approach is to just step into the ring.
For areas where the demand is more speculative (such as for trainings for adjacent audiences), we recommend TTS Education create incremental experiments to continuously validate and grow their educational offerings.
It seems that the formats we commonly think of as education — generic workshops, virtual courses, and lectures — are often the least effective in terms of enabling people to apply those learnings at their jobs. People reported that embedded experts, mentors, social networks, and other long-term follow ups experiences are more effective in cementing new practices within a team and organization.
It can be difficult to know at what point during transformation education can be effective and what topics that education should cover. Transformation may begin at different levels—top-down from leadership, bottom-up from a committed employee or team, or from the middle-out, as described in the transformation research report—and may look different from one organization to another.
Several of the innovators and educators we spoke with mentioned that they thought 18F was well-positioned to provide something that is missing from the federal landscape: a way for individuals, teams, and agencies to self-identify where in the digital transformation process they are, as well as which services offered across the federal government — educational, consultative, or otherwise — would best serve them based on their current needs.
Given the discussion about reworking digitalgov.gov, and its history as a focal point for people interested in digital services inside government, TTS Education should explore what it would mean to remake digitalgov.gov in this way.
“What I wish we as government did a much better job at is creating a more effective decisional framework at the front-end of the process, so that you could match a given problem to a subset of potentially effective tools. Does that make sense? Early-stage coaching. In general, if we did a much better job of that, that would be huge, and that would help me, because then I would get people who have vetted the idea of running a challenge more, and we could just get straight into it.”
This approach dovetails with the follow-up work pitched as part of the original digital transformation research. This is an opportunity to bring the threads from these different projects together in a way that significantly strengthens TTS’s presence in the federal marketplace while also providing a powerful tool for people and agencies looking to change.
We observed many education programs offering low-cost educational materials as a way to create outreach and awareness of their more extensive offerings. We believe TTS Education can set up a similar funnel that uses content offered for free as a tool for both generating awareness, as well as testing the level of demand for certain subject areas.
One of the things most consistently lacking in our conversations about educational offerings was any sort of robust framework for getting feedback from participants about what worked for them, and what didn’t. Most of the educators we spoke with primarily got their feedback from participants through follow-up email. Their exploration of what issues to provide new information about was limited to monitoring and querying participants in various online communities of practice on an ad-hoc basis.
While these approaches are effective to a degree, TTS Education would benefit from a more systematic approach to gathering feedback from participants in our education program as they progress through the process of digital transformation, in order to ensure that the educational material and trainings we offer stays consistent with market needs.
- Project Home
- Executive summary
- Overview
- What we found
- What would we like to do if we had three more months? < You are here!
- Methodology supplement