View publication - Chartered Institute of Housing

DELIVERING HOUSING LEARNING IN A TOUGH ENVIRONMENT
organisation in better focus.’ and ‘ it made me think about solutions a bit more than I
would have done!’
This latter comment is, I think, particularly key – learning centres in partnership with
housing employers want to empower students to assess challenges, research options,
but also to become problem-solvers too.
Housing organisations are looking for flexible education solutions, such as through
bespoke courses developed in partnership with HEIs. Some organisations are
collaborating with others and developing academies to provide training directly relevant
to member organisations. These can be created on a social enterprise basis and provide
training and skills to employees across the organisation, and perhaps to tenants too as
part of housing and employment programmes.
There is room for a range of models in housing education in the future and the role of
the learning centre in helping to provide the scaffolding on which to build programmes
of learning is important as there is a wealth of expertise in teaching and learning as well
as subject knowledge. It is important that housing organisations utilise the learning from
individuals in a smarter way, in order to avoid ‘organisational amnesia’ and to get the
best value for the organisation and the housing customer out of the investments made
in housing education.
We are living in an age of ‘big data’ – this means that we are dealing with extremely
large sets of information that, unless we manage the ways data is collected and
analysed it can be too much to be actively useful. The amount of information that we
collect, not just as housing organisations, but across business, government and society,
is phenomenal; it has been suggested that digital data is growing by approximately 60
per cent per annum. 9
However, data is not the same as insight. We need to connect the dots between data
sets across sectors in order to understand our housing customers better so as to respond
to the pressures of the current tough environment. Organisations need to think about a
‘big data’ plan; 10 so that in these challenging times they can turn information into
customer insight. HEIs providing housing education to equip professionals for the future
should think about the challenges for ‘big data’. Whilst it is not proposed that all
housing lecturers will become computer analytics experts and statisticians, the principle
of enabling students to see the bigger picture, to connect the dots, must be at the heart
of what we do.
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