The story of Impact Tutoring’s success in the digital sphere was the focus of a short video recently filmed at the Te Awamutu business.

The video was filmed for Digital Boost’s library of ‘real world’ stories, online clips of small Kiwi businesses that are leading the way in terms of their application of digital processes.  There are scores of stories in the Digital Boost library, each one telling its own story of a business adapting to a digital world.

Nicola Stallard of Digital Boost in Auckland said that after signing up to the programme, Impact Tutoring had been identified as a particularly good digital example.

“We do a brief question and answer session to see how businesses are making use of digital. We found that Impact Tutoring demonstrated really good application over the 10 digital tools we measure,” she said. “They are doing a great job of moving with the times.”

Former teacher and Pirongia School deputy principal Jean McKenzie started Impact Tutoring about seven years ago, primarily to deliver education holistically to people from junior school-age children through to adults.  The Covid-19 lockdown last year prompted her to develop a set of new learning modules aimed at targeting specific areas of tuition. A portion of the sale of those modules goes towards a programme to support maths learning among young people who may otherwise not be able to afford it.

Jean said student numbers were now around 200, some 55 of them online. Learning is accessed around the country with tutors in various areas. Just weeks ago, they took on their first overseas student – from Chile.

“We offer face-to-face learning, as well as online courses and modules. There are many reasons people might want to access learning in this way – we try to be receptive to what people want of us,” she said.

Digital Boost is a government-backed skills training programme available free to all New Zealand businesses through the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE). It produces short educational videos, learning summaries that can be printed out, and offers question and answer sessions with industry experts.

Evelyn Seewald, project leader with one of Digital Boost’s delivery platforms, The Mind Lab, said it went on stream last December/January in recognition of the need, driven primarily by Covid-19, for New Zealand businesses to upskill digitally.  There are 35,000 members nationwide.

The programme promotes digital learning in six key areas – websites, digital marketing, digital tools, small business accounting, business insights and future technologies.  It offers a series of ‘how to’ instructional videos, and others focusing on ‘real world’ stories of businesses successfully adapting to digital. Those businesses fit within 10 industries the company identified as having different types of user experiences, including the primary sector, construction, manufacturing, retail and the service industry.

It was in the service industry that Impact Tutoring made its mark. 

The five-minute video of Impact will likely be uploaded onto Digital Boost’s website in the next few weeks.