Affordable Marketing Services for Businesses Through Youth Training in Times of Lockdown

10.06.2020
Many young people used the period of lockdown due to COVID-19 pandemic to their advantage. While education institutions closed down and job opportunities shrank, learning new skills online to fill a specific gap in the market – affordable marketing services for businesses – became the thing for the motivated.

Seeking to contribute to the community during such difficult times, United Pixels Academy (UPA), a training provider mainly for graphic design, motion design and application development, moved fully into online teaching mode and designed a special program to create a pool of young creative designers who can then provide affordable services to small and medium enterprises in Kosovo, primarily from the food processing and tourism sectors. 

This specific online course was Photoshop, which according to Armend Berisha, founder, is a skill needed by “a broad range of professions: architects, photographers, graphic designers, fashion designers to mention a few”. That is why they decided to teach this course. UPA was able to implement the idea with support from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, through the Promoting Private Sector Employment project.     

The targeted participant profile was primarily young people, including students of marketing or sales for whom knowledge of Photoshop adds real value to their CVs, but also other people with an affinity for this skill.  

“We taught online courses before the pandemic too. During the Photoshop course we noticed how eager the participants were to learn as much as possible. The experience proved to be interactive, with an easy and effective approach making a stronger case that we can achieve quite a lot through online learning,” says Granit Cernaveri, one of the instructors. 

Read full story on https://medium.com/@ppseprogram