Digital transformation through reflection and action in continuing education

This paper reports Danish small and middle-sized enterprises’ (SME’s) learning and competence
development on digitalization and new digital technologies through continuing education. The aim of
continuing education courses in the KomDigital project, anchored at the Department of Applied
Mathematics and Computer Science of the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), is to strategically
facilitate participants’ reflection and action in teams for digital competence development. With the goal
of designing impactful continuing education, we inquire how a systematic approach to reflection and
action learning in groups show characteristics of the digitalization strategy of the SMEs. This qualitative
case study analyzes the observations of workshops, company documents on digitalization, and
evaluation of the continuing education course of ten Danish SMEs. The companies’ (course
participants) reflection and action appear to have four categories of factors that characterize their
digitalization profile: digitalization strategy and mindset, multiple viewpoints and common language,
research collaboration and domain knowledge, and simple experimentation and adoption. In the future,
based on the findings, a questionnaire tool will be developed for self-assessment of digitalization
strategy for the pre-course expression of interest and post-course impact assessment.