JISC

Overview

Labour Market Information (LMI) is interpreted and used by a wide range of stakeholders; education institutions, learners, potential learners, Sector Skills Councils, IAG organisations, schools, careers professionals, development agencies, local authorities.

The project seeks to:

1. To deliver a streamlined and shared service LMI solution in the cloud (“IT-as-a-service”) for learners, employees and institutions. It is to be made available through the Aimhigher in the East Midland YFEM website, an existing course directory and progression service – which aims to facilitate and enhance the guidance process and collation of LMI, and specifically to: 

• Streamline a set of core processes thereby reducing the duplication of effort for collating and using LMI
• Improve efficiency of curriculum development processes, enabling more agile and employer responsive curriculum
• Enhance info about learning provision for learners, employers and wider stakeholders

1. To enable institutions to increase student employability by supporting learners make course choices by making available information of the content of the courses and specific qualifications and their respective value in academic and employment terms
2. Preparing students for the labour market by making available information about employment to prospective students

Aims and objectives

The project aims to:

• Analyse how LMI is collated, interpreted and presented with a range of stakeholders
• Develop a set of templates for audience-defined LM interfaces
• Evaluate/present the business case and potential efficiency benefits to stakeholders of a shared LMI service
• Analyse the LMI datasets and link XCRI datasets LM primary data
• Develop a web service to accept XCRI course data and export relevant regional/local LMI data
• Develop interfaces to display ‘on-the-fly’ LM intelligence based on course criteria using templates.
• Investigate the use of ILR/HESA destination data to supplement XCRI exports from institutions.
• Investigate how linked data methods could be used to deliver services

Project methodology

A consultation strand will focus on the user requirements and business case/benefits of the LMI service through:

• Identifying priority regional sectors where LM Intelligence is most vital
• Clarifying the business cases for institutions/stakeholders,
• Consultation stakeholder workshops

A technical pilot proposes to:

• Identify relevant key coding systems to handle the interfacing between the XCRI and LMI datasets
• Develop services to link data sets and to import XCRI data, outputting course/region specific LMI templated interfaces
• Trial an ‘XCRI-in, LMI-out’ web-service with 2-3 HE/FEIs
• Investigate ILR/ HESA destination data

Anticipated outputs and outcomes

Outputs:

• Baselining of current LMI gathering processes to build the business case
• LMI templates to inform technical developments
• Web services for ‘XCRI-in’, ‘LMI-out’ and codings
• Benefits analysis
• Stakeholder workshops
• Dissemination to institutions, wider regional and national stakeholders, learners

Anticipated outcomes are:

• Improved course progression service for the East Midlands
• Enhanced efficiency through avoiding duplication of effort in preparing and interpreting LMI
• More efficient development of demand-led curriculum planning
• Value-added service for IAG professionals
• Integration with existing open data and ecosystem initiatives in the East Midlands

Technology / Standards used

• XML
• XCRI 1.1
• XHTML 1.1
• XSLT 2.0
• SOAP