School’s in Session: Keeping up with Digital
How do you keep up with the Joneses in the digital age? As a new intern at Hanson and a college student, every day I learn something new. However, you can’t stay in college forever, so once you’re on the job you have to find other ways to keep learning. This is especially crucial for those with jobs in the digital world because technology is constantly changing. I interviewed several of my colleagues to find out how Hanson employees stay sharp. What I learned is that we have a range of training opportunities, both external and internal.
Dale Carnegie Training
Ever heard of the book How to Win Friends and Influence People? It is a renowned book with over thirty million copies sold and was written by Dale Carnegie. The book triggered the further development of his popular business leadership courses.
Hanson has sent twenty-five employees through these courses over the years. Employees found this training helped them learn how to develop better employee relationships and lead in an always changing workplace. (It may have even helped them win some friends too.)
“I use the skills and knowledge of what I learned through the training every day and not just at work,” said Steve Bumbaugh, one of our Directors of Engineering.
Amy Shrewsbery, an Account Executive at Hanson, said the course has improved her client relationships by teaching her about effective communication. “In the world of marketing we think in terms of segments and we categorize people into specific groups with specific needs. I learned in order to be successful, sometimes you need to take a step back to remember that we are all human. We all like to be appreciated, heard and understood,” said Amy.
Google Analytics Training
Several employees agreed it is important for everyone to have an understanding of how analytics work. We are a Google Analytics Certified Partner and use Google Analytics to help our clients analyze their digital marketing performance and to assess what the best digital solution will be for them.
Our analytics specialists attend the Google Analytics Certified Partners Summit every year to maintain their technical expertise, but Hansonites in other disciplines have also participated in the less formal Google Analytics Academy to help them better understand analytics in relation to their own disciplines.
“Adding the Google Analytics Academy to our training curriculum has helped many Hansonites gain effective cross-department knowledge, while our partnership with Google continues to help Hanson stay ahead of the game in the digital metrics space,” said Chris Kujawski, a Google individual-certified Connection Strategist.
Internal Training Opportunities
Hanson also has several internal initiatives including Hanson U. This is our closest equivalent to college (minus the homework and million dollar textbooks). This is a time for all Hansonites to come together regardless of their specialty and share ideas about new digital trends. Attendees include members of all teams who simply just want to learn a skill or advance their understanding of a topic. Examples of past presentations include “Understanding Angular JS,” “SEO for Non-specialists,” and “Effective Collaboration with Google Docs.”
“The internal education efforts such as Hanson U are ways to help each other become more rounded as opposed to our external efforts that help us with our main job,” said Mike Osswald, VP of Experience Innovation.
In essence, I discovered, we all have to keep learning because ideas are our products. We strive to create quality work for our clients and therefore must always “stay in school” to keep up and be ahead of those “digital” Joneses.
