Next Step: Senior Digital Consultant by Julia Harrell
What’s a synonym for a Senior Digital Consultant (SDC)? The answer is an expert. And, what do you get when you walk into a boardroom full of SDCs? The answer is a wealth of resources, communality, leadership and industry knowledge, which up until recently, was kept internally within each team.
To be promoted from a Digital Consultant to a SDC, you must specialize in an area of focus that is not only beneficial to your team but provides continuous knowledge growth. This promotion also means that you are an expert in that area of focus whether it is our technology offerings, digital advertising, task efficiency, customer service, etc. The goal is for all SDCs to leverage one another in order to cross reference this information amongst our teams. And, since 2020 is all about working smarter rather than harder, we are ecstatic to have the opportunity to work as a group.
SDCs meet on a monthly basis to collaborate and create resources that are transferable across teams with one area of focus per quarter. Each quarter, we select an area of focus and complete half day working sessions to ensure everyone has the understanding and resources to most effectively train their respective team. Noting that lack of our technology offerings is limiting in any career at Shift, SDCs are becoming experts on the business. We are working to produce training materials to reference company-wide as well as creating certification courses. We are still working to figure the details, and how the certification would be integrated throughout the company, but we are excited about this process!
As the SDC positions and meetings are a new to Shift, challenges have certainly presented themselves. We are currently working on ensuring that time is used as efficiently as possible and that everyone is contributing to each meeting. We are also evaluating how to the incoming group of SDCs can contribute to our current projects once formally promoted. These challenges have been minimized by trying to account for feedback from the group, by looking to the success of EVOLVE and trying to see which processes are well received, and by planning prior to the meetings.
We are excited about the positive feedback that these collaborations have received, and we look forward to more “experts” joining us in the future.
Next up, Digital Advertising!