Student Story: Emily McAuley

My name is Emily McAuley, and I am currently a Digital Learning Business Executive at Meritec Limited. I left university last year, so this February marks the first year of full-time work. I started learning how to work with digital learning products when I started at Meritec as a salesperson, however I shortly realized that sales wasn’t really my area as I preferred to be more creative. From having knowledge about selling the products, I became more invested in how to build the products itself. Whilst I was on this journey, I wanted to start upskilling in the digital learning sector and that’s when I was introduced to the DLI. Firstly, I completed the Certificate which I thought was really great, which made me progress to the Diploma. I’ve found it’s helped build my understanding of what we sell at Meritec and how I can get involved with creating the courses.

Currently I market the products, and on the side, I sell and demonstrate our products on Zoom. However, since doing the Diploma with DLI I got the free trial from DLI for articulate 360, so I have actually got the chance to build some courses myself. I also work with stakeholders, ask them what they want and create animated videos alongside.

Going from sales, this digital learning course has taken me into a different area of business that I didn’t really know about, which has led me to actually look into jobs in the digital learning sector, which I’ve never thought of. Luckily my manager is just amazing, and he quickly realised I’m more of a creative person and was so impressed that I’d managed to build a course, in a matter of weeks without using the software before, so now I am beginning to move away from sales and personally take interest in the digital learning sector.

There has definitely been a lot of benefits. I wasn’t a very confident person and always kept my ideas to myself. So once I got into this area, I was able to develop in a different place more in line with my interests. From building these courses I’ve given them new ideas about video development which actually I managed to create an animated video and send it forward to the team and CEO of the company and to say you don’t have any video content and I think this is what you need to do. So now we implement the videos and trailers I make into our courses, on social media and our website. So it’s just done magic for me to be honest.

I started off not knowing what digital learning was, so if I didn’t do this course, it wouldn’t have opened up this whole new world for me. This diploma it’s not expensive either and it’s about 16 weeks long. You do a piece of coursework every two or three weeks, so it doesn’t make a difference to your day-to-day work life, so to have that on the side is just a great break away from work. It’s a really positive thing to know that you’re learning something new all the time. And then at the end of it, you can just find something new that you love, which I think is amazing. So, I think if you’re thinking about doing it or not doing it, definitely do it. It’s just really nice to know that I’ve got that extra skill and opportunity, to take with me wherever I go.