JISC

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This project explored the collaborative provision by FutureSkills of a new Foundation Degree in multimedia design. In West London the potential market for this degree is some 300 design related businesses.

Executive Summary

Future Skills for the Design Industry in West London is a JISC Business and Community Engagement (BCE) funded project.

The project objective is to help implement the Leitch Review’s call for an employer-led system. The aim is for 40% of the adult population to achieve Level 4 qualifications by 2020. This project focussed on how to effect a significant change in the market mechanism for matching employer demand for workforce development with institutional supply, and has delivered two prototyped solutions.

West London hosts one of the largest concentrations of creative and cultural industries in the world. This industry is high on the UK Government’s skills agenda. This industry poses some special challenges for workforce development such as a contingent labour force of ‘one-person bands’, a fragmented ‘eco-system’ of many small companies, and new technology that can rapidly raise the demand for new skills.

Led by Roehampton University, this is a joint project with Thames Valley University and Hammersmith, Ealing and West London College. Thames Valley University is implementing the UK’s largest Leitch inspired project – FutureSkills.

This project explored the collaborative provision by FutureSkills of a new Foundation Degree in multi-media design. In West London the potential market for this degree is some 300 design related businesses.

The requirements for new processes and systems were collected from interviews with education institutions and focus groups of employers and students from the design sector. Large, medium and small employers were contacted, but mainly small companies volunteered to participate in the focus groups.

Design sector employers solve skills gaps or shortages by hiring contractors and outsourcing work to other companies in their network. Employers do not contact educational institutions when they have a skills gap. Employers view universities and colleges along traditional lines as a valued source of new graduates. Employees, freelancers and recruitment agencies are those most actively engaged in the skills market.

Universities are strongly structured around their core business of full-time undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. They have attractive opportunities to expand their core business into the profitable market for fee-paying foreign students.

Mainly due to Government funded programmes such as Train to Gain, further education is substantially ahead of higher education in terms of employer engagement. Leitch recommends new funding to provide the financial incentives for universities to engage with employers.

Thames Valley University’s FutureSkills has the greatest potential to build a bridge to the design sector in West London. It has new funding, and a core business and infrastructure which spans both further and higher education. It has the opportunity to establish a new market position, becoming a new brand in education and training for this and other sectors.

Employers had little difficulty in expressing their requirements for skills. They need individuals who have a blend of intellectual skills and practical skills honed by real world experience. They expressed dissatisfaction with the structure of design courses and the quality of individuals coming to interview from institutions. There was more quantity than quality.

Students didn’t always agree with employers. They had direct experience of looking for the right courses of study and also expressed dissatisfaction both with the information available and the quality of education.

A purely employer-led solution is rather narrow; solutions have to be demand-led, including freelancers, recruitment agencies, employees and students.

The project designed and prototyped a solution that creates a virtual industry space that includes a skills market place. The solution brings together demand and supply by matching demand for ‘skills’ to ‘learning outcomes’. It automates employer-led development of learning outcomes, modules and programmes of study.

The solution has two parts:

Design Skills Network for West London

This is an industry web portal. It is the single place where the hundreds of employers, employees, recruitment agencies, students, education providers, and other stakeholders who make up the ‘eco-system’ can come together to share information of interest to the sector.

Using modern web technologies this is a highly cost effective means of bringing buyers and sellers together.

Design Skills Course Designer

Accessible from the industry portal, this application facilitates ‘bids’ for educational and training services to be matched with ‘offers’ from education and training suppliers. Uniquely, employers can build their own courses.

Higher and further education would benefit from this direct feedback from their market. Requests for customised courses are strong market signals, largely absent in the current set-up. Institutions would have to think harder about the suitability of their current courses.

By engaging employers, overall demand for education and training will increase. The new business would be generated at low cost. A custom course may be more expensive for both parties, but employers would pay a premium if it added value to their business, and students prefer employer endorsed study. Institutions have unused capacity and customised courses can use under utilised resources if priced using marginal costing.

Employer response to the prototype solutions has been very positive, for example:

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