Developing an Online Offering Through a Global Pandemic
Posted on 15, Apr 2021

The past year has seen changes in almost all aspects of life, we changed the way we live day to day, the way we socialise and the way we work. In almost all capacities these changes often have negative connotations, however for Social Care Training Ireland, there was a positive outcome created through our innovation combined with our team's ability to adapt and overcome with the extension of our service offering to include webinars!

March 12th, the first announcement, that was the day when panic initially set in. We were involved in classroom-based training which involved physical contact. Given the coverage of Covid-19 to this point, we had reservations about contracting/spreading the virus. Casting back to this date, that was definitely when the team realised work had to be done to ensure we could continue to deliver training and ensure our courses and more so the quality of the courses we delivered remained  available through what was and still is, something many teams and businesses like Social Care Training Ireland had never experienced.

As a team, our initial focus was to ensure training after the 12th of march was rescheduled and all course participants were both updated and accommodated to continue their learning experience with Social Care Training Ireland. Rescheduling became a regular occurrence for Mary, our training coordinator who constantly ensured, through each government announcement and change to policies, no organisation or individual was left uncertain about training and rescheduled dates. When a full lockdown was announced on March 27th, we knew we had to adapt our offering to ensure we could still deliver essential training to organisations and individuals nationwide.

As a team we deliberated on the best option, there was of course the option to pre-record course content and upload this to a data base where participants could access this. However, organizations have constantly reiterated that what separated Social Care Training Ireland is the interaction and engagement between course participants and our instructors. This is something we have built our offering around, we understand and incorporate the importance of interaction and engagement between all participants and instructors into each of our courses, ensuring a more holistic learning experience. For this reason, we decided the best way to continue to deliver excellence in care provision was via webinar.

Our team worked tirelessly to ensure we could create online courses that still provided the interaction and engagement, although challenging to begin we realised we could deliver excellent training via webinar and ensure organisations and individual's could still avail of essential training throughout a global pandemic. A lot of large organisations nationwide depend on Social Care Training Ireland to deliver a full suite of training courses for their teams, alongside this we have a number of individuals constantly looking to learn, up-skill and develop in their social care careers, this shows the importance of our ability to offer our services online. 

Had we not made the changes at the very beginning in March, we would most likely be awaiting the announcement of a return to classroom-based training, which at this point, still seems a distance away. Covid-19 brought a lot of uncertainty to business across Ireland, for us – having the ability to move our offering online and alleviate one worry for the organisations we worked with was essential, ensuring clients could meet staff training needs through Covid-19 was an area of concern for many organisations throughout this period.

The reaction and feedback to our webinar training has been extremely positive so far, testament to our team’s work in ensuring the quality of our classroom-based training transferred online and into our webinar-based training. The engagement and interactive elements of our classroom based learning which many of our course participants had acknowledged Jennifer ( Business Manager, Social Care Training Ireland)  and Carol ( Lead Trainer, Social Care Training Ireland) for throughout various trainings was incorporated into each webinar offered by Social Care Training Ireland. With a a full training schedule for the weeks and months ahead, we look forward to delivering more webinars to the organisations and individual's we work with nationwide