Helping Businesses Grow Their Skills
Scotland's national skills agency, Skills Development Scotland (SDS) helps people achieve career success and supports businesses. It works with both individuals and employers to up-skill, re-skill and educate Scotland's people. In early 2019 we were successful in a Europe wide tender process to become part of a framework to deliver User Experience and User Interface (UX/UI) design services for four years. We placed first on the framework, scoring higher than some huge international consultancies.
Skills Development Scotland
SDS's main goal is to ensure people in Scotland have the right skills for themselves and their employers. Since January 2020, we’ve supported SDS in this by delivering large and small scale projects across many of their existing services, including: My World of Work, Apprentices.scot and Our Skillsforce.
The core of the support we provide is across consultancy and design. Services have included stakeholder recruitment and engagement, user research, leading discovery workshops, vision workshops, design sprints, wireframing, visual design prototypes and copywriting.
We have worked with SDS to find the sweet spot that lies between the core needs of service users and the needs of the organisation. We collaborate closely with their digital services team, attending stand-ups, running fortnightly demos, helping plan and take part in fortnightly sprints, and taking part in wash-up meetings to review learnings for future projects. We also engage directly with service users to gain further insights, sharing these with SDS to work together on next steps.
We have delivered several projects contributing towards Scottish skills, including:
an online self-service tool helping adults understand their transferable skills
an online self-service tool helping organisations understand and grow skills
a redesigned resources area on My World of Work that teachers across Scotland can use to deliver careers education to pupils
a skills discovery tool for employers to understand existing workforce skills and potential skills growth areas, all driven by real time data.