Teaching digital Marketing For The Post-Covid Workplace: Insights From Working With Industry To Shape The Curriculum

While guest speakers are a regular feature on many digital marketing courses in HE, this research highlights an innovative approach, in which industry partners were embedded in the module development. Triangulating the student, speaker and academic outcomes, the research highlights the benefits of this approach in equipping graduates for the post-Covid workplace and providing employers with candidates with knowledge of current industry priorities and practices. The research draws on experiences from a module on the postgraduate digital marketing course at a university in the north east of England. This region, like many other regions in the UK, suffers from a digital skills gap, exacerbated by the lack of relevant industry experience on the part of new graduates.Digital marketing agencies struggle to recruit and have been working closely with the university to find ways to address this issue. To help address this, the academic lead supported digital marketing agencies in designing, developing and delivering a module that introduced the key features of digital marketing, with current trends and industry practices central to the learning experience. The agencies designed the curriculum and taught the module through guest speaker sessions, through combinations of live streaming, pre-recorded content and face to face delivery. Additionally, a wide range of delivery technologies were used, including tools such as Teams for delivery and live feedback on student tasks, Padlet for students to share content and Kahoot for rapid fire quizzes etc. All technologies used were available to students via university systems or free to access via smartphones. All sessions involved live industry briefs that students worked on in groups, delivering their responses to the industry partners at the end of each class. Student feedback on the module was excellent and interviews with the guest speakers involved in the project has identified industry, educational and academic benefits of this approach. The approach provides innovations in pedagogy, delivery methods shaped for a post-Covid environment and skills development for students, which directly relates to gaps identified by industry specialists. It also provided valuable CPD for guest speakers, particularly junior team members, giving them opportunities to extend presentation, public speaking and communications design skills. This approach can be used in any area of marketing education and the research offers tips on how to integrate industry partners into the learning experience, whatever aspect of marketing participants work in. The workshop will also make use of some of the tools used in the module to make encourage participation and make this a lively and engaging session.