NotableTalks about: edtech #digitaltransformation #startuplife #learninganddevelopment
Rapid Fire Round with
Olga Filipova
What is digital transformation & how is it impacting the business ecosystem?
Digital Transformation
Today, many companies are adopting digital transformation in their internal operations to customer interactions to effectively and efficiently fulfil their business objectives. Could you kindly explain to our audiences what exactly is digital transformation and how do you see it impacting the business ecosystem as a whole?
Today, many companies are adopting digital transformation in their internal operations to customer interactions to effectively and efficiently fulfil their business objectives. Could you kindly explain to our audiences what exactly is digital transformation and how do you see it impacting the business ecosystem as a whole?
Yeah, sure. In a very simplistic way, digital transformation is when you move some manual or paper process to your computer. For example, if before we were signing contracts on paper, we would send them around by post office. Right now we can prepare a Google Doc and sign it and send it to people through email or DocuSign or any other service. And it makes business going faster. It makes businesses grow faster.
And of course, it affects the whole ecosystem in a way that the competition, as well as cooperation, becomes faster. In order to be competitive, you should move faster in your digital transformation roadmap because otherwise you will be eaten by your competitors. For example, if you are growing and you're hiring new people and you still do onboarding face to face and one on one, you will be slower. So it makes sense to somehow move onboarding, for example, to the digital world.
How digital technologies are being used in Education sector & what is the future of Education Sector?
Ed-Tech
Digitalisation in educational institutions is making significant changes to the way students learn. With remote studying becoming more popular globally, how are digital technologies used in today’s education landscape and how is the whole learning experience expected to change for students in the future?
Digitalisation in educational institutions is making significant changes to the way students learn. With remote studying becoming more popular globally, how are digital technologies used in today’s education landscape and how is the whole learning experience expected to change for students in the future?
Yes, digitalization makes a huge impact on learning and education, especially in the last two years of Covid. We saw that for the schools and universities to be prepared for the digital world was crucial. Some schools were not prepared for having digital classes and it was a very chaotic mess. But of course, everyone had to adapt. And now what I see more and more is that schools and universities have somehow of a hybrid thing. They teach something in class, but they also have a lot of things online which makes things faster and it streamlines processes a lot.
And another impact on education and not only in the classroom or University or schools also incorporate education is that right now we are getting used to right now during the past years we are getting more and more used to have all the information on our fingerprints. So for some things spending five years in the University and learning the subject, doesn't make sense. Of course, it does make sense still to acquire some fundamental knowledge. But combining it with hybrid and online and digital learning and the hybrid and blended things, they work really well together and it works really well in any kind of education in the classroom, in the universities, in the corporate education as well.
How to ensure a cyber secure Hybrid Workplace?
Hybrid Workplace
With the hybrid work model being implemented in many companies, as well as many students today learning remotely through e-learning, secure data protection increased its importance for today’s internet users. As the co-founder of 2 companies, how did you ensure a secure working environment for your employees, and how do you see the future of a hybrid workplace?
With the hybrid work model being implemented in many companies, as well as many students today learning remotely through e-learning, secure data protection increased its importance for today’s internet users. As the co-founder of 2 companies, how did you ensure a secure working environment for your employees, and how do you see the future of a hybrid workplace?
Security in the digital world is crucially important, especially because of data privacy and data of users and employees. Of course, it's very interesting that we are just discussing security lately, almost every day, with the aggression coming from Russia. It's a topic of discussion for many, many companies and entities. There is a lot of cyberwar going on. It's a hybrid war, and there is a lot of things going on hacking websites and taking some data and doing something with it. But of course, imagine that we are outside of the world and we are talking about providing security to our users, to our clients, to our employees, with our digital products or environments.
And there are some obvious things that should be done to guarantee data security on a technical level. Having a secure connection via SSL certificates, make sure that you use trusted cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, for example. In our case, we use AWS and we make sure that we use everything possible there and everything available there to prevent those attacks. Database hacking. And of course, we do password encryption and we make sure that no one is able to connect to those databases and to get data from yeah, this is how we do it.
How to choose right marketing channel for your business?
Marketing Strategies
As digital technologies are being more involved in one’s lifestyle, and with the introduction of Metaverse, digital platforms are now the key for many businesses to survive. With your extensive experience and seasoned knowledge, what do you think would be the key marketing channels on which one should focus to drive their business and meet their marketing objectives in 2022?
As digital technologies are being more involved in one’s lifestyle, and with the introduction of Metaverse, digital platforms are now the key for many businesses to survive. With your extensive experience and seasoned knowledge, what do you think would be the key marketing channels on which one should focus to drive their business and meet their marketing objectives in 2022?
Marketing has changed a lot during digital transformation. But not only this, of course, but it also depends on whether you target businesses or consumers. But there is a common thing, the creator economy which drives both B2B and B2C marketing channels. So for example what you do with podcasts, you create some content, you curate it and you acquire with this content your users and clients. And this is very important nowadays.
For example, we have TikTokers influencers that scale their creations to their consumer audience and we have LinkedIn, podcasts, webinars where we can create educational content and help people to learn about some particularly interesting subjects acquire our target audience with it. Education is the key and I think that it should be focused on any marketing activities.
Ukrainian businesses during these tough times of war
Russia Ukraine Conflict
You are originally from Ukraine. How do you cope now during these difficult times for your nation and how are you managing to run your business and support your country at the same time?
You are originally from Ukraine. How do you cope now during these difficult times for your nation and how are you managing to run your business and support your country at the same time?
Well, the first couple of days were super difficult because we were not believing in what was happening. We could not believe that we knew that Russia was threatening Ukraine, but we never expected that it would brutally attack the country. And, of course, it became impossible to focus on work. It's hard to sleep. We wake up really early and we grab our phones. We ask our families and friends, are you still alive? How are you? And we try to help as much as we can. We coordinate some cargo delivery. We pipe on the information front line. We helped our volunteers to help refugees. It's very hard. We want to country be in peace, we want to stop the war and we don't want it to spread to Europe. And of course, we also try to go to politicians in Europe and ask them for help. That needs to be done in order to prevent the escalation to World War III. But also there are several things that happened to workademy. So after a couple of days, I realized that we have this business and we wanted to still run because only by running our businesses we support the economy and we can help Ukraine.
But of course, I wasn't able to do the usual stuff that I was doing before. So acquiring clients through LinkedIn messaging, following up, writing emails, having some events, having some content, was out of the question. So I launched the campaign that by the name Acquire an LMS and Help Ukraine. And basically, in this campaign, I said to my network, hey guys, this time I don't have time to go after you try to follow up or whatever. So this is as simple as it is. If your company needs a learning management system, we have a learning management system for you. Half of the subscription price will go to help your Ukraine. And this way I try to have both still run my business and acquire clients and help you Ukraine at the same time. Another thing that we do with Workademy, is we provide our platform to people who create stories about some educational stories about what's going on. And we are also preparing educational materials on hybrid wars and on propaganda, because we have been saying for 70 years after World War II, never again. And now look what happened. So we failed as a world tolerating the propaganda that Russia has been doing to prepare these horrible things. So education is really important. And I'm really happy that we could provide Workademy for such a good cause and to make this never again a real never again thing. We try to do as much as we can and use technology to help us in this.
Motivation Behind WorkAdemy
WorkAdemy
We are curious to know the motivation behind WorkAdemy?
We are curious to know the motivation behind WorkAdemy?
At WorkAdemy, we believe that any employee's knowledge is worth being scaled to the entire organization. And this is why we created our learning management system that has an integrated guide that helps anyone to transform their expertise into online courses, to share with their peers, and to help companies to grow.
So for the employees, it's a tool to scale their knowledge and to share it with their peers. For the learning and development departments is a tool that helps them easily create, train and collaborate with the employees in training creation and also gather important metrics to see how it goes. And for the companies, it's a tool to grow their business faster.
