Better choices for creative learners

Creative and Cultural Skills Council (CCSkills), a Sector Skills Council, has a Government remit to ensure that the skills taught in higher and further education match the skills required by the creative industries. Their objectives include developing a platform of online services with tools that help learners make more informed choices about their paths into education, on to employment and then into continuing professional development.

Through working with leading service brands, we’ve learnt that if you want people to use your service you have to design it around their needs. We set out with CCSkillsto understand the needs of learners, employers and educational institutions. We investigated how a CCSkills online service could create value for all those interested in the sector, not just the learner; and what each group could offer one another.

Working in collaboration with the prominent UK think tank Demos, we conducted creative focus groups and email surveys to understand three interrelated concerns. Firstly, how young ‘creative’ people currently make choices. Secondly, what skills and educational experience employers believe to be valuable? And thirdly, what can be understood from existing commercial models of choice on the internet? Our research also entailed a novel approach to mapping all the service touchpoints between users and stakeholders, and considered the various ways in which commercial activities could contribute to the sites’ running costs.

Visualising the flow of the on-line portal.

From this research we developed a vision of a portal in which learners, employers and educators can co-create content and in so doing support an interactive decision-making journey for learners. The next step was the top-level design of the websites which would deliver the services. To assist with this process - and help communicate the future shape of the project to potential funders - we created compelling illustrated user journeys. We then created a substantial specification document for the whole platform, with diagrams including high level information architectures for the websites.

Specifying the content and functionality of the service.

Our help enabled CCSkills to specify a system for improving the quality of graduates’ educations by assisting them to make the right choices as students. And because the system allows stakeholders across the entire creative community to derive value from each other’s interactions, CCSkills and other creative community leaders will also be more able to affect change from the top.

The specifications we created has been developed by CCSkills and their web team into a a helpful and accessible website.