New Work Cornwall
Open up information pertaining to employment, skills and support.
New Work Cornwall
In February 2010, Sea were appointed by Dott (Design of the Times) Cornwall to deliver a pioneering project funded by the Skills Funding Agency. Cornwall is home to 530,000 people. Of those over 80,000 citizens are economically inactive and around 20,000 are unemployed, yet around 3,000 job vacancies are advertised at the Job Centre at any one time. Gripped by a global economic downturn, our challenge was to identify how we could help people gain new skills and find real employment opportunities in Cornwall.
The Approach
Key to our approach was putting the needs of people first and identifying what employment opportunities exist. With a focus on people at risk of redundancy, we actively engaged with more than 500 people across Cornwall to understand their needs and involve them in the process of designing better skills, support and employment services. 300 people attended co-discovery workshops where together we discovered the biggest barriers to gaining new skills and getting back into employment.
We also mapped 28,000 future employment opportunities in Cornwall from £1.1 billion of investment.
The Opportunity
Working with participants, businesses and support providers, we co-designed five new services to overcome barriers.
Each service idea focussed on one or more of the five main barriers - lack of confidence, lack of skills, insufficient support, job opportunities, and lack of ambition.
Two of the most exciting outcomes were the New Work "Access" and "Exchange" services which combine the power of information and community to provide individuals with knowledge and opportunities specific to their personal needs.
New Work Access is a digital solution that maps employment opportunities in Cornwall in the near or distant future, including information on investments, sector growth and decline, and skills provision. This information is designed to empower the individual. A person can, in a series of clicks, see future investment, what the future jobs in their local area will be, how that sector is doing and what skills are relevant to that career path. In just a few minutes they can access the skills provision, support and funding to pursue a new career pathway.
New Work Exchange links closely into Access, but is based on a community of individuals helping each other gain new skills and experience in a sector they may wish to go into. Working on a time credits for participation basis, individuals can access free training, advice and guidance from their peers and can offer the same in return, in event of redundancy or a need to change their career prospects. Together these services can help tackle the barriers people face after experiencing redundancy, those just looking to change career or improve their prospects.
We have developed prototypes for these services which we are beginning to trial.
