Your Company Needs an Internal Learning Strategy

Editor’s note: This piece is part of our Columnist Network series, which explores the tactical thoughts and actions from Adweek’s community of high-level experts. Today, Dorothy Hui of Sony Music U.K. highlights the importance of keeping pace with industry developments with an internal education strategy. Below, in her own words, she describes how her company has doubled down on digital throughout Covid-19. The challenge The pandemic has been a key moment in the acceleration of global digital transformation. As lockdown put the world on pause, people flocked to video and virtual means of communications. Retailers large and small implemented new ecommerce and home delivery infrastructures. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram and Facebook rapidly evolved new product features—short-form video proliferated as an entertainment format, and new creator monetization and commerce tools were introduced. More of us began to embrace voice activation, and social audio platforms gave rise to new creative possibilities as we connected and learned together in real time. It's become essential to find ways to share and scale learnings from this past year of rapid change across our whole organization. This has led us to ask ourselves, how can we best work with the leads across the company to continue to embed cutting-edge digital knowledge across all functions? The process In 2016, my team collaborated with HR on a new internal education program called Digital Uncovered. This was born out of a company desire to understand more deeply the different facets of the digital division. Our aim was to highlight the multiple disciplines comprising digital and to examine key industry topics and trends. Sessions highlighted subjects like paid digital media, analytics and CRM, and sought to provide hands-on creative and strategic learnings that could be applied in artist campaigns. When the pandemic hit, with everyone working remotely and connecting digitally, our 4th Floor Creative digital and audience development team decided to ramp things up. We wanted to broaden the range of topics we covered and ensure we shared learnings in a way that kept pace with how fast the world was changing. We also realized that we needed additional prongs to our approach. We curated a long-term learning journey—specifically zooming out from the existing program to include both big picture and foundational knowledge. We began by drawing up a digital skills map, which depicted how digital intersects different functions within our organization, stretching from creative and marketing to operations and legal. My team and I met with digital leads from Sony Music’s labels to identify focus areas for a new organizational learning agenda. From there, we expanded Digital Uncovered from sessions supporting artist-level campaigns to a companywide forum encompassing strategic priorities. We're also devising a program focused on core digital music business curriculum. As everything moved online, we saw our employee reach increase dramatically—our most recent event attracted hundreds of attendees and received positive feedback about the value of the sessions. The takeaway Encouraging a culture of curiosity and developing a company learning agenda is critical to innovation. By investing in education, we empower teams to drive change and stay ahead of the rapidly evolving multimedia landscape. This helps us provide the very best service and expertise for our artists—and maintain a digitally fluent workforce across all functions.

Columnist Network

Your Company Needs an Internal Learning Strategy—Especially Now

A look inside Sony Music U.K.'s approach to digital education and integration

The challenge

Dorothy Hui

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications

The challenge

WORK SMARTER - LEARN, GROW AND BE INSPIRED.

Subscribe today!

Dorothy Hui