16th July 2024 - Google Digital Garage Training Day in York

The City of York Council has an initiative to assist small to medium businesses, especially in the digital arena. This week, they teamed up with Google for the second year running to provide a digital skills training day in the heart of the city.

York Council have worked with Google for a couple of years now, offering YouTube-based online training on topics such as digital marketing, this year with a heavy emphasis on AI of course.

The last of these training sessions was an in-person get together in the form of a full days training hosted by the Council and presented by the Google Training team.

I was lucky enough to secure a place to attend this full-day training this week for the second year running.

Like last year, the training day took place in the stunning Hospitium, a truly beautiful venue in the centre of York's museum gardens.

The day was broken down into 4 training sessions:

1. Boost Your Productivity with Al with Kirstie Kavanagh
   
   
2. Decision Making With Data also with Kirstie Kavanagh
   
   
3. Problem Solve Like A Consultant with Glenn White

Both Kirstie and Glenn talked about the sessions last year and are fantastic, informative speakers... A credit to Google.

Everybody met in the morning at the venue where coffee and pastries were offered and a chance to network before the sessions started. 

The Hospitium is an absolutely beautiful venue, I have been there a number of times and walking into this place gives me a sense of awe every time, but today was not about the venue, it was about learning from Google themselves.

After breakfast, we all went upstairs to the first session and the welcome to the day, presented by Cllr Kilbane, and Louise Saw from York City Council. 

Welcome Session 

Cllr Kilbane is the deputy leader of the City of York Council and gave a speech about how York is embracing the digital world and small to medium businesses. Louise followed him explaining how the day will unfold and other information for sessions. 

Session 1 - Boost your productivity with AI

The whole day had a slant towards AI because everything digital at the moment seems to involve AI in some way and Kirstie's talk was about the tools that you can use to help you perform regular tasks more efficiently using AI.

The session covered a brief overview of artificial intelligence, a breakdown of some of the most useful AI tools for productivity and lastly, hints and tips for creating effective prompts. 

As a regular attendee at talks and meetups, I've seen various overviews of AI before, and Kirstie focussed on a high-level introduction showing how AI is used in everything including your smart speakers, Netflix viewing and banking software. 

The talk was to focus on generative AI and how it can help you with inspiration and creative content in your everyday working (and home) lives. One interesting slide was how Google has put in place a set of "principles' incorporating privacy, testing and unfair biases. A nice refreshing approach to AI from the onset. 

During the talk, Kirstie broke down better productivity into 4 areas:

1. Summarising Content
   
   
2. Learning and Understanding
   
   
3. Content Creation and
   
   
4. Automating Tasks

Within each area, she highlighted how it helps, which AI services were good for this area and what to watch out for. I like this last point as she kept hitting home how you should never accept the content that AI gives you without some checking, adding that some AI systems are prone to "hallucinations" where the AI just makes it up. 

Lastly, we were guided through how to create prompts to more efficiently get the information you want. 

A really great talk, especially for those people less familiar with these AI tools.

Session 2 - Decision Making With Data 

The second session was also by Kirstie. The talk discussed various different types of data sources and how you can use them to help with your business. 

Kirstie covered 4 different elements in this talk. 

1. How Data Can Help Your Business
   
   
2. Exploring and Understanding Data
   
   
3. Getting hands-on with Data and
   
   
4. How to Look at Data to Make Better Decisions

This session felt quite in-depth for the usual type of introduction sessions you usually get in these seminar days, and she covered lots of things from Google Sheets (you would think that Excel didn't exist, but I prefer Sheets anyway) to Google BigQuery and SQL Database Systems. 

I would imagine that most of the audience would just straight to Microsoft Office for everything but this was a Google Day after all 😉

As I said, the talk went quite in-depth, discussing the difference between quantitative data and qualitative data and examples of where and how you would use each. She discussed spreadsheet functions giving examples of common ones and less common ones that could help you retrieve the information your company would need, such as retrieving the average values from a spreadsheet row. 

Lastly, she gave examples of SQL and how to query an SQL database. This was at a very high level of course and I felt a little out of place for most people as to take full advantage of SQL you would require a database server and client software, not just a simple spreadsheet app you can download (I'm going to ignore Microsoft Access at this point, as should everybody hehe 😛). I think the reason Kirstie covered SQL was to show that as a company gets bigger, and has more data, there is better solutions to structured data than Spreadsheets, so I will let her off 😎

Lunch

This was the end of the morning sessions, and now it was time for lunch and networking downstairs in the building.

The food was great, lots of options for everyone whether you were a meat eater, vegetarian, or vegan and also catering for other food issues such as gluten-free...

It also gave me a chance to talk to people about their businesses and issues, and I met some very interesting people and gave out a couple of business cards!

Session 3 - Problem Solve Like A Consultant with Glenn White

For the third and last session, Glenn chose a less "AI-centric" topic for his talk, focussing on problem-solving techniques that consultants use and how you can use them in your business and everyday lives.

Glenn as always, gave a very energetic talk and this time was about the various problem-solving techniques you can employ. 

He started by explaining how people traditionally solve problems differently focussing on how you would approach a jigsaw puzzle for example. And then explained that a good consultant would step back from the problem to see the bigger picture, and then to break it down and approach it with curiosity, open thinking, emotional intelligence and objectivity through an analytical mindset. 

He explained about breaking down a problem before focussing on different techniques that can be used depending on the circumstance. these techniques were: 

1. Six Thinking Hats
2. Five Whys
3. SWOT Analysis and
4. Group Thinking

Being in the industry for many years I have heard of and practised most of these except "Five Whys" which is essentially about starting at the top and asking questions until you find the root of the issue. He gave a great explanation of this using the Lincoln Memorial as an example. I won't go into each of these techniques but you could google them, watch videos about them or even ask AI 🤖

I think I learned the most from this talk, especially in the situation I am in doing freelancing while deciding whether I want to do this full-time or find a full-time job so it was a great end to a very fun and informational day.  

Workshops

Throughout the day there were a number of small workshops where people could discuss in small groups about issues with their sites and digital services. As was the case last year, I didn't take advantage of these, opting to attend all the sessions instead but I heard from people who had gone that it was a tremendous help.

It's not often you get to have hands-on mentoring directly from Google so it really is great that people were able to take advantage of that. 

Fun and Informative!

This year I made a point of networking and talking to people, and everyone was friendly and open. I had a great time and learned a little too. 

I would like to say a big thank you to the Google team, both the speakers were fantastic as usual and have bounds of energy, confidence and enthusiasm

Louise at the City of York council and her team did an astounding job putting all this together. 

This was my second year at this particular event and 'm very much looking forward to the third!