Tech partnership delivers digital skills training to thousands of students across the UK

The Tech Partnership is a network of employers working to creating skills for the UK’s digital economy. Their ambition is to deliver the skills for a million tech jobs by 2025.

They work in three critical areas to help reach their goal of creating the required skills: inspiring new and diverse talent to opt for digital careers, raising the quality of digital skills training and enabling employers to offer high-quality digital apprenticeships.

The Challenge

The Tech Partnership needed to develop an online learning platform for talented young people interested in digital careers. This platform needed to reach a diverse, geographically dispersed audience of young people who needed to be equipped with the technical skills required for their future careers.

The Solution

The Tech Partnership chose to work with Totara Partner Accipio to create an LMS which would help them reach the widest audience possible.

Accipio designed Totara Learn to host all of the Tech Partnership’s engaging learning content. Every school in the UK has been uploaded to their LMS as an ‘organisation’, meaning individual schools can create customised reports to better understand how their own learners are engaging with the content. Teachers are set up as ‘managers’ to enable them to track progress and mark assignments.

They also created a badge academy to recognise learning credits. These badges are sponsored by various high-profile employers, and can be earned automatically or via grading by teachers at the students’ schools. This gives students an easy way to prove their participation and progress, and teachers a quick at-a-glance overview of students’ achievements.

As well as this, Tech Partnership now has a customised signup process complete with social media logins. This makes it simple to join the LMS, and allows them to capture data on learners. This was particularly useful for the Tech Partnership’s relatively young audience, many of whom are used to social logins on other sites to get up and running quickly.

Course pages on the LMS have a ‘completion wheel’ to show progress through each element of the learning, which can also be accessed from the learner’s dashboard.

The LMS and its course pages also benefit from Accipio’s ‘slider grid’ plugin, meaning there is no need for LMS administrators to learn HTML coding to make a page look beautiful, making it easy to set up, manage and edit pages for greater flexibility and a better look and feel.

The Results

The Tech Partnership is delighted with its new Totara Learn from Accipio. Over 10,000 schools have already been entered into the system, and there are more than 3,000 active learners.

Feedback on the site has been exceptional, and the platform is already delivering costs savings and extending the reach of learning for thousands of schools across the UK. The LMS is now a key pillar in the Tech Partnership strategy to equip young people with the technology skills required for the future.