Scottish Information Literacy Project

On Tuesday 17^th February Christine and I went to Aberdeen to visit David Gibbons – Wood, a senior lecturer in the Business School at Robert Gordon University who has obtained over £400,000 in European funding to run training programmes for SMEs in the Aberdeen area. So far he has enrolled 20 businesses that are providing 70 participants although he wants 175 people in total.  He is offering 12 courses in ‘bite sized chunks’. There will be an online forum to identify what learners want to do. However a blended learning approach will be used as wholly online delivery is unlikely to be successful. He is finding that individuals are more motivated than organisations which tend to focus on short term objectives.  He has been interviewing representatives of local SMEs. A lack of time available for training was the most cited problem in developing business skills in the organisation followed by a lack of money. From the list of subjects proposed the most popular was Marketing, followed by Finance, Enterprise Skills, leadership and E –Business.  This is interesting information for those interested in information usage in the workplace as marketing has fairly obvious possibilities. However there are clearly going to be problems of uptake with any form of training.

David had not previously given much thought to a role for information literacy in workplace training but he is interested now. There will be more feedback from his work in due course which should be very useful and we will continue to collaborate.

For more information about the project see the Business Skills for Growth website