Conversation design (CxD)— a skillset for the future
RMIT’s College of Vocational Education (CoVE) in Australia and The Conversation Design Institute (CDI) in the Netherlands, have partnered to deliver jointly accredited conversational AI skills programmes to Australian learners.
Conversational AI is a fast-emerging technology for organisations.
Almost all businesses use some form of chatbot solution on the web to provide customer service or for internal operations. There is now also an industry for conversational-enabled assistants (Google Home, Apple Siri) that go beyond text conversations and use voice recognition and synthesis.
The skillset that enables these technologies to work effectively is conversation design (CxD). CxD is a blend of human and technology skills that enables conversation designers to plan, design, test and deliver conversations between people and technology.
At the College of Vocational Education (CoVE) at RMIT University, we recognise the importance of this fast-growing industry that builds the systems that millions of people interact with every day.
So we have partnered with the Conversation Design Institute (CDI), the world’s leading industry training and certification organisation for conversational AI skills, to provide a unique programme of industry-ready reskilling and upskilling for roles in the growing conversational AI industry.
The programme couples CDI’s industry-leading global training with the College of Vocational Education’s Industry connections and track record as the leading provider of practical, work-relevant learning focused on emerging technologies that will shape the future of work.
“The Conversational AI industry is seeing explosive demand for conversation design (CxD) skills from companies in many industries. We are excited by the opportunity to partner with CDI to train, upskill and reskill those who want to enhance their knowledge and professional skills in this future-oriented career and help deliver productivity benefits for Australian companies”.
— Dr Peter Thomas, Director of FORWARD, RMIT’s Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation.
The online courses are based on CDI’s world-class CxD courses plus RMIT’s career-ready support materials. They will prepare Australian learners to join an industry with explosive growth in careers in companies across the economy, both in Australia and beyond.
The courses provide the core knowledge and skills for industry roles including conversation designer, chatbot manager, digital product specialist, conversational UX designer or voice user interface designer.
Those who choose to study these courses might be new to conversational AI, have a background in artificial intelligence, natural language processing or speech interfaces, business analytics or customer service, or may already be working in one of the many companies that are using chatbots and conversational interfaces and would like to upskill or reskill you for success.
“CDI is proud to partner with one of Austraila’s leading universities. There is a huge need for skilled talent in Conversational AI, and every day here at CDI we get requests for trained and certified professionals. By connecting our certification programs with RMIT we will be able to upskill and reskill the workforce ready for exciting jobs in AI. We look forward to building this relationship and seeing the first Australian students become certified.’’
— Olaf Igesz, founder of the Conversation design Institute.
To learn more about the RMIT and CDI conversational AI courses, visit the course home page.
FORWARD is the RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation.
Our role is to build an innovative learning ecosystem at scale, create new collaborative applied research and invent next-generation skills solutions that will catalyse workforce development in the future-oriented industries crucial to Victoria’s economic renewal.
We lead collaborative applied research on future skills and workforce transformation from within RMIT’s College of Vocational Education, building and scaling the evidence and practice base to support Victorian workforce planning and delivery and acting as a test lab for future skills to develop and pilot new approaches to skills training and education through digital transformation and pedagogical innovation.
We leverage RMIT’s multi-sector advantage to translate research insights into identifying workforce requirements and the co-design of practice-based approaches with industry.
