Teaching of important digital skills go unnoticed

On May 9-13 and 16-20, the Student Technology Assistance Team (STAT) held several tutorials and lessons for students, teaching them how to use programs such as Scribd and the cafeteria’s Café Rewards system.

The truth is that not many students even know about STAT, the Fort Steilacoom campus’ program made for helping students understand technology and programs that are quickly becoming a requirement in the modern world.

John Johnson, a staff member who started working with STAT in the spring, said, “Everything has a growing point, and STAT definitely has room to grow.  Our biggest problem is just getting noticed by the student body.”

The assertion that STAT goes unnoticed seems to be true, as these training sessions were neither posted on the calendar on Pierce’s website nor in Student Life’s spring calendar.  These sorts of training sessions, in fact, were not out of the ordinary.  

STAT is available to help students as long as the main computer lab in Olympic 301/302, 7:30 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, 7:30 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. on Fridays, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on Saturdays, and 12:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. on Sundays.

Ngoc Tran, another STAT staff member, agrees with Johnson about the trouble in the program being noticed despite potentially being one of the most important resources available to students.

Recently, STAT has been working to become more visible to students.  Johnson said that they now have advertisements on the large monitor screen in the Cascade building’s fifth floor hallway, as well as a table in the same building’s third floor stationed to help students outside of the lab.

The webpage for Pierce’s computer labs (http://www.pierce.ctc.edu/dist/labs/) also features video and PDF tutorials for using programs and information required at Pierce, such as the student email, Canvas, and installing Microsoft 365.

“Lots of students don’t know how to log in to their email, or Canvas.”  Said Johnson.  “I would estimate that about 50% don’t even know that Microsoft 365 is available for free.  I started going to school here in winter and working at STAT in spring, so I’ve seen both sides.  Being both the person who needed help and the person giving it.”

Johnson said that it is gratifying to give students the help he himself once needed.  He described how helpful it was to find out that he could have programs such as Word, PowerPoint, and Excel installed on his computer at home for free thanks to Microsoft 365.

“We want students to come to us, but they can’t if they don’t know we exist.”  He said.  “That’s why we’ve been working so hard at growing.”

Both coworkers agreed that the technology utilized in the computer labs and taught by STAT were important aspects of student life, as well as their future careers.

And the statistics seem to agree.  According to a 2015 study by Capital One Financial Group and Burning Glass Technologies, middle skill jobs that require digital and computer skills are growing faster than those that do not.  

After looking at roughly 40,000 job boards and 100 million postings, the study found that “Nearly eight in 10 middle skill jobs require digital skills. Spreadsheet and word processing proficiencies have become a baseline requirement for the majority of middle-skill opportunities (78%).”

As the economy recovered from the recent recession, it was found that during that time growth for middle skill jobs that are “digitally intensive” have had growth equivalent to jobs that require high skill and that middle skill jobs that do not require digital skills have had the slowest growth of any category, even low skill, low paying jobs.

The fear is that technology is moving fast, and without the proper training, students are in danger of falling behind.  Digital skills they learn today could even be obsolete by the time of graduation.

The hope is that STAT can keep these students up to speed, but only, as Johnson reiterated, if students know about it at all.