Digital transformation of education and training cannot be avoided anymore (OPC on the Digital Education Action Plan 2021-2027). For Sea Schools and other VET organisations that means that it is of vital importance to continue with their digital transformation regarding their business model as well as in their education and training to fulfil students needs and also expectations.
But how far sea schools actually are in their digital transformation? Let’s have a look at the current level of digitalization for each of main business functions: Operations, Human Resources, Marketing, Sales, Finance, and Management.
Operations
Operations are mainly theoretical courses in a classroom environment, practical courses at sea and online courses, but some are also examination centres, publishers etc. While practical courses can only be held at sea the theoretical courses may be held in classroom environment, online or hybrid. Most sea schools already offer online and/or hybrid courses but not all of them have adapted teaching/learning materials. Many only responded to the new reality of social distancing due to the pandemic situation which started in 2020, otherwise they would most probably never migrate from classroom to online environment.
Human resources
Human resources includes training and education, staff recruitment, provision of temporary personnel etc. Most sea schools train the trainers ad hoc without any analysis and plan, only few evaluate trainers based on customer satisfaction service outcomes and then plan their training.
Marketing
Marketing includes promotion, branding, market research, customer satisfaction service etc. This business function is the most digitalized as sea schools without effective marketing wouldn’t survive and marketing without a certain level of digitalization is not effective. E.g. online advertising without setting up the right target group and analysing different adverts would have too low return of investment and would be consequently considered only as a cost and not the opportunity. There is so much competition in marketing that even sea schools should be always up to date with current technologies. So, most sea schools are advertising at Google/Facebook and are using Google Analytics. Most of them also have at least one social media account. Customer Satisfaction service is not often used by sea schools as a high level of digitalisation is needed to run it automatically, so most sea schools simply send requests for reviews on Google/Social Media platforms from the students after completion of theoretical/practical courses.
Sales
Sales includes customer support service, online sales etc. If sales are not digitalized, a sea school doesn’t have a CRM and many after sales activities cannot be digitalized (emailing, payments, packaging and shipping, customer support etc.). Most sea schools only use Excel or similar software to keep records of their students, but they are doing that by hand and they cannot link it with other business functions. Digitally transformation of the sales function is one of the preliminary steps towards totally digitalised sea school. It should be stressed that most sea schools have an online store but just few have their online store connected to CRM. Their motivation to have an online store is mostly to accept online payment methods (credit cards, Google Pay, Apple Pay, PayPal etc.) as most of the payment transactions are made online. Unfortunately, not many are using very powerful personalized payment links in emails as CRM is needed for that.
Finance
Finance includes accounting, book-keeping, purchasing etc. Nowadays there are no more companies which are not using accounting software for book-keeping. So, accounting software is used for book-keeping of any company but it is important that the finance department and management have full access to it to be able to generate documents directly from it and to get valuable information from it for business decisions. Many sea schools are so small companies that they are only involved in annual account procedures and are not taking advantage of using accounting software.
Management
Management includes planning, organizing, leading, and controlling (of all above business functions). Management keeps all other business functions connected in the right way to maximise customer satisfaction, sales, revenue, profit etc. The management itself cannot be digitalized, but all the input data should be digitalized and any data used for management activities should be up to date and always ready to be used. Sea schools are doing their best in management for sure, but those who are more digitalized can make better decisions.