About Nesta

Nesta is an innovation foundation. For us, innovation means turning bold ideas into reality and changing lives for the better. We use our expertise, skills and funding in areas where there are big challenges facing society.

CareerTech Challenge: Leap

CareerTech Challenge is an ambitious innovation programme led by Nesta and Nesta Challenges in partnership with the Department for Education. The programme focuses on stimulating new solutions for precarious workers, such as workers in low paid, insecure work, susceptible to change, to upskill and retrain online, or access accurate data-driven information, advice and guidance that helps them find work.

Agent Academy runs an award winning, industry designed and delivered learning programme. During the 12-week programme learners gain specialist skills for the creative and digital industry.

Agent Academy will design and develop unique personalised online learning content, using “real world” scenarios to increase employability of learners through automatically generated work portfolios that can be attached to a learner's CV.

Participate

Sign up to Leap

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The platform, Leap, launched on 12 October and within the first couple weeks registered 1100 learners to the public beta. The team has been working closely with the learners to help steer the future iterations of the build and gather the learners’ valuable feedback on the platform.

Watch this space for further impacts in the coming months as testing continues.

When the pandemic hit, we were already hosting a cohort of learners for our existing programme targeted at 18-24 year olds. We took this opportunity to extend the programme and give real-world experience to the students by setting up a human-centred design challenge to the students based on the target learners for Leap. Students undertook directed learning and self-paced research to discover the challenges faced by learners over the age of 24, and proposed adaptations to the Leap platform to better suit the future adult learners. We are so proud of their hard work and the fantastic result!

Over the next 6 months Agent Academy will welcome learners to Leap who wish to pursue a career in marketing. We will also partner with well-known brands to add further value to learners' portfolios. Information from the platform will be used to conduct a full evaluation, which will support Agent Academy to make adaptations to the platform and content, whilst understanding what motivates adults to learn.

For more information on Leap, please contact [email protected]

Website: www.agentacademy.org.uk

Twitter: @Agent_Academy

LinkedIn handle: @agentacademy

Author

Dan Byrne

Head of Strategy, Agent Academy

Zoe Wallace

Director, Agent Academy

Kurtis Boylan

Head of Labs, Agent Academy

Liz North

Liz North

Liz North

Programme Manager

Liz was the Programme Manager for the CareerTech Challenge Fund.

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