Reskilling a global workforce to adjust to a ‘new normal’

At the World Economic Forum, we used our global summits and workshops as one of the ways we connected business leaders, academia, policy-makers, media, civil society orgranizations, and the public to collaborate and solve the world’s problems.

The challenge

When Covid took over how we interact, our reliance on in-person relationship building and collaboration was seriously challenged. The switch to only virtual was imperative but we found that a large number of coworkers in the organization were suddenly responsible for visual content without having basic design skills.

As a small team that’s used to taking on large tasks, keeping our eyes on all visual work from all 5 offices seemed a bit impossible. We knew this sudden shift had to be approached differently - for the sanity of us all.

The solution

We created a course to introduce and practice the principles of visual communication touching on communication theory, design thinking as well as the basics of typography, layout, colour and multimedia storytelling.

To prepare, we surveyed colleagues in all offices to form the course based on their specific needs. To garner attention for the course we designed an animated video to help promote the training further across all of our global offices

Zoom-fatigue in mind, we maintained a workshop-style structure allowing colleagues to use examples in their day-to-day. We quickly quizzed participants to test their ability, organized breakout groups to apply the lessons in context and followed up with “office hours” to help colleagues tackle some of their unique challenges.

I co-led instruction, designed materials, and illustrated video assets alongside our event designer over the duration of the course offering from January 2020 to August 2020.