Setting up Goals regarding Digital Transformation is a topic which might differ from sea school to sea school. Nevertheless, its importance is critical for the future development of the sea school, even its existence as a business in today’s economy.
Before setting up Goals/Objectives, every organization should start with its own analysis over their current digital knowledge and digital skills level and what is the current level of digitalization of their enterprise.
Straight from the beginning, due to the fact that it is one of the main limitations when it comes to digitalization, every organization should focus on Acquiring Digital Skills for their employees. The knowledge and skills and how to analyze the individual level are the first place to start in order to determine the need of future training. If knowledge is a constraint and training necessary, then time and money are secondary factors that are needed to overcome any skills gaps that is why this should be considered as one of the main goals, when it comes to digital transformation in sea schools.
Increase Digital Capacity should follow as one of the main goals when it comes to digital transformation in sea schools, as this has been observed during the pandemic as being a main limitation for implementing digital tools and strategies.
Moving forward, the goals of digital transformation will be following your main business goals, as digitalization is aiming at improving current business processes, by reducing time, money and human and other resources allocated for these processes. So following the business structure of your sea school organization you can set Becoming More Efficient as one of your main goals.
What does this mean in particular? Following the main business departments, particular to each sea school organization, one can set more specific sub-goals which would improve efficiency in all these departments, considering the digital knowledge and skill of its employees.
For example: in the Operations department
As observed in the “OPC on the Digital Education Action Plan 2021-2027”, the respondents of the survey indicated that the main advantage of digital technologies in the future lies in their flexibility and capacity to allow learning at one’s own pace. Individual respondents confirmed in the consultation that flexibility and learning/teaching at one’s own pace is the greatest advantage that digital technologies will have in the future, so sea schools can focus on developing digital educational content related to its theory courses and a part of their practical courses in order to support this.
This will increase efficiency for the students, as well as for the sea school itself and its instructors, as they will no longer be required to travel to specific venues for the theory classes, they could allocate time according to their own schedule while going through the digital educational content and would prepare online for their examination using online exam simulator platforms which would give them an indication of their current preparation level. Also, this can allow the sea school to create and offer more courses, via online platforms, reaching more targeted clients who have specific requests, not to mention the capacity to perform better during another pandemic restriction situation.
For example: in the Marketing and Sales Department
Implementing website optimization tools, online shop modules, e-mail marketing tools and social media platform tools combined with search engine analytic tools can boost the client base for sea schools in their country/region, or even world-wide, thus increasing the revenue, simplifying and making more efficient the communication between parties and delivering targeted content only to certain segments of the client base.
For example: in the Management, Finance and Human Resources Departments
Beside the implementation of CRM software and LMS software, which bring real time reports related to clients/students/instructors and might help make day to day management decisions much faster and also more accurate, and never the less would reduce costs on the medium to long term operations.
Also, using less or even no paper at all, by implementing a digital transformation for the regular business processes the sea schools have, this is another way of looking at this “Becoming more Efficient” main goal, by becoming more environment friendly.