My digital transformation story – by a digital coach-trainer-researcher

In the last 2+ years, we have all probably experienced some form or degree of the digital transition.
Personally, for example, I became a full-time digital coach and trainer, wrote my dissertation without going to any brick-and-mortar library – although I did order a few paper books from Amazon and had to print the final version – eventually, I defended my dissertation online. I also keep in touch with my international team online.

Meanwhile, I have increasingly noticed that digital tools are able to convey the human aspect. I talked to many people online that I had never met in person, yet they opened up on a level that shocked me: we laughed a lot (we may have even danced 😄💃 ), reflected, learned, and some of those meetings may have made them/me cry or let emotions run wild. Just as national borders dissolve online, so too do geopolitics, cultural and geographical events become themes or contexts: U.S. Americans venting about the George Flloyd tragedy, Canadians about the truck blockade, news from around the world about Covid, tragedies, lockdowns, riots, wildfires, earthquakes, floods, and even in recent months, my clients from Ukraine, whom I have accompanied, supported or simply listened to online, sometimes wiping our tears together. For me, all these deep connections are proof that digital tools can connect people.
But I also experienced how much we all struggled with the digital transition, how much new technology we had to learn from Friday to Monday (if we were lucky we had a weekend for this shift but sometimes it had to be done overnight). In our own lessons/sessions, or even in our children’s lessons, the ‘suffering’ was often palpable, failing to engage the attention of the children or adult learners. Gone were the multi-day training sessions, we had to think in terms of shorter training blocks, coaching sessions. Lessons, meetings, and curricula had to be planned differently, engaged and monitored differently.
But while there was help for the technical stuff (guides, tutorials, videos, descriptions), there was little to turn to for methodological guidelines and tips, the whole world was experiencing this digital shift and cluelessness at the same time. At the beginning of 2020, realizing this gap, I contacted my competent international trainer, coach and educator colleagues, with whom we decided to join forces, research, find solutions, innovate and create a community to help with the digital transition in the soft skills area.
With this mission and vision at work, I wrote the first Erasmus partnership application of my life. The idea, the partnership and the project plan won the support of the European Commission and the TRENDSS Consortium was born in 2020 consisting of 6 organizations from 6 different countries, of which I am now the president and my partner (and husband) Károly Hanyecz is the agile coach and project manager.
Most of the time we worked online but luckily the last year we also managed to meet in person couple of times due to the restrictions being lifted.

(In short: it is not easy to lead an international project, meet deadlines and collaborate remotely in a turbulent period. But at least, I can really relate to what my manager and executive coaching clients are talking about … 😅)
But more importantly, I believe that our team in the last 2 years has created useful and practical intellectual outputs that TEACHERS, LEARNERS, TRAINERS, COACHES, MENTORS, ONLINE FACILITATORS, YOUTH WORKERS, EDUCATION STAFF, ONLINE EDUCATIONAL CONTENT CREATORS could benefit from as it covers a specific need and niche in Digital Soft Skilling.
These FREE RESOURCES are available on our trendss.eu website and they were also introduced to our international target audience on 26 the May in Budapest through a Conference at ELTE University. (Our next conference will take place in Greece.)
Our conference was more than just a simple conference we managed to walk the talk and provide real interactive and hybrid tools related to our outputs that created real connections with our audience.

Photos of the Conference where we had a panel discussion (Q&A session) and 4 workshops related to our innovations.

If you’d like to learn more about digital transformation you can sign up for our Conference video here: https://trendss.eu/conference-budapest/