JISC

As part of its commitment to upgrade workforce skills, the UK government has pledged funding for 250,000 more apprenticeships over four years. Learning providers will also have greater freedom to respond to the needs of employers and learners.

Work-based learning providers can rise to these challenges by providing a comprehensive range of qualifications and apprenticeship frameworks, supporting learners to achieve. To do so, they need to engage strategically with businesses and develop flexible and appropriate methods of course delivery.

Our advice and guidance can help providers use technology to manage relationships with employers and learners.  Targeted at the needs of a particular sector (higher education, further education or independent work-based learning), the information contained will often be useful to other sectors. 

• JISC’s Regional Support Centres offer FE and Skills providers tailored advice and guidance. Listen to our podcast to find out what help they can offer (go here for a definition of work-based learning).
• We’ve launched an online service to help work-based learning providers save an average of 20% on their procurement of goods and services ranging from general business to specialist educational and training supplies.
• Our Work-Based Learning Maturity Toolkit helps organisations providing higher education assess how well prepared they are to deliver effective work-based learning.  Independent work-based learning providers may, however, find it useful as a different perspective on a familiar topic.
• If you are engaging with a number of different employers, you may want to manage your relationships systematically. You may find our Guide To Customer Relationship Management useful. Engagement with small and medium-sized enterprises can be particularly difficult. We’ve developed ACUMEN to share tools and experiences developed by projects we’ve funded, for example the Xerte Learning Object Creator  for creating interactive, open learning materials which can be shared with businesses. 
  • The Lifelong learning and workforce development programme developed tools and advice to help organisations with different aspects of work-based learning. 
  • One project, for example, built a toolkit to enable learning providers and employers to develop new courses collaboratively.
  • Another used e-portfolios to tailor course material and its delivery to the needs of work-based learners.
  • Yet another developed a system to accredit an employee’s prior learning and incorporate it into a learning framework encompassing HE level qualifications.

Providers in the different sectors will need to collaborate more, if the further education reform programme ‘New Challenges, New Chances’ is to succeed.