Ways of working
We began by familiarising ourselves with new tools and applications such as Trello, Miro, and Notion, which prompted us to create separate boards to practice within a safe group environment. This allowed us to experiment without the fear of accidentally impacting someone else's work. We have our own Trello board, Slack channel and hold weekly stand-ups. As part of our upskilling journey, we have been using Notion to maintain apprentice diaries, documenting our monthly activities, reflections, and experiences. These diaries serve as valuable records for self-reflection and tracking our progress throughout the apprenticeship.
We have completed both Digital and Agile: the foundations and Agile fundamentals for teams to gain a foundational understanding of how teams operate within CDPS and to begin to learn some Agile methodologies. This knowledge and insight into the courses played a crucial role in our content design placement activities.
In November, CDPS held an all hands meeting which was a great opportunity to meet people face to face, to complete some ice-breaker activities, which were not as bad as we all thought they might be and to hear about CDPS’ priorities for the coming year.
Over the last 2 months, we engaged in deep-dive meetings with service owners and CEOs, this allowed us to gain insights into their respective services, ongoing projects, and gave us a comprehensive overview of CDPS.
Our content design placement
Our content design placement started by shadowing the content design team members during stand-ups, planning sessions and communities of practice. This helped us to get an understanding of the day-to-day role of a content designer.
Our first hands-on piece of content design was for a blog post. We were handed a blog post on the challenges of recruiting apprentices and asked to edit it. Initially we were hesitant to go through someone else’s work, but after receiving some practical pointers and becoming more confident in knowing what content design meant, we got to work. The blog post is now on the CDPS website.
For our content design module, the learn digital skills team had a task for us regarding upcoming changes to course delivery. The team were unsure how to communicate these changes and how to change the course content on CDPS’ website. It was decided we should split the problem in two.
Firstly, to update the course content online and secondly to write a blog post explaining about the challenges delivering courses currently and future changes.
As this was part of our college module, we each created separate content and then shared them with the skills team for feedback. We used this feedback, and the user needs to collaborate and inform our prototype, which we designed in Figma, developing skills in using a new tool. For the blog post on the course changes, we actively contributed to writing prompts and organising the information, showcasing our improved confidence and skills in content design.
The final part of our college unit involved uploading changed course content to the CMS. With guidance from the communications officer, we documented the process with screenshots and witness statements for our content design college module. We were all surprisingly nervous about hitting the publish button.
College
The apprenticeship scheme at CDPS is in partnership with Gower College Swansea. There is a list of 13 mandatory units that need to be completed throughout the apprenticeship, which totals 74 credits. Agored ,the awarding body advised completion of the mandatory units in Ethical Principles and the User Centred Design (UCD) landscape first due to them being viewed as high priority units. After the two units were handed in, our college tutor and line manager collaborated and created a timetable for us that aligned the rest of mandatory units with relevant learning on our work placements. It was agreed that our third mandatory unit would be on content design methods and activities as we were currently placed within the content design team at CDPS.
As previously mentioned, the third mandatory unit focused on presenting evidence of our participation as content designers within a specific project. This allowed us the opportunity to develop knowledge and skills in this area.
At the end of 2024, we will choose our preferred area in UCD and, at the same time, choose from a list of optional units to reach a minimum of 10 credits. Combined with mandatory units this would total a minimum of 84 credits.
How we learn
The learning we do within college is mainly self-lead, doing a lot of our own research and learning from our work placements. We have a set day within our working week dedicated to college work which we have agreed to be a Friday, as this is a quieter day within our organisation.
On occasion, we have meetings with our college tutor on a Friday. This allows us the chance to ask him questions we may have about the unit we are working on.
Our college tutor has clearly communicated with us that we can contact him whenever we need understanding or clarification and has started to introduce presentations on the topics related to our units, to give us more insight.
He has also started to include practical activities within our sessions, for example, when working on our content design placement, he ran a tutorial on a programme called Wireframe and showed us how to create basic prototypes.
Other mentions
Back in September, we were given WEST assessments (Wales Essential Skills Toolkit) by Gower College Swansea. These assessments were in application of number, English communication, and digital literacy. Based on the outcome of our test results, we were given worksheets to view and fill out. They are ongoing tasks to be completed alongside our units, they are designed to upskill our knowledge in these subject areas.
Challenges
We had to overcome some small hurdles when we first started college. At first, it was interesting for us to get our heads around understanding the completion of units as there were no set deadlines for them to be completed by.
It was communicated to us that we could be flexible with when to complete them, if they were all handed in by the end of the apprenticeship.
This was a new way of learning and working for us as none of us were familiar with working in such an independent way without having set deadlines to work towards.
As this qualification is new it meant that we were all initially learning from each other. At the beginning we were trying to find our pace and how to correctly approach navigating the college aspect.
We understand and accept that there would be a lack of clarity on certain things as this is a new scheme not only for us, but for CDPS and Gower College Swansea, and therefore we are all learning. With support, we have now established a good system to help us in both our learning and working environment. To help us have a goal to work towards we have now been given rough deadlines for our units, with the flexibility of extending them if we need to. Our timetable that aligns college units with work placements and dates has been proving to be helpful and gives us a visual understanding of the structure and time frame of the apprenticeship.
With the new learning material and practical activities that has started to be provided for us, we feel we have a healthy balance of taught lessons, practical activities, self-led research and on the job learning as well as general support from both Gower College Swansea and CDPS.
Coming up
User research placement
Now that we have 3 to 4 months of experience under our belts, we feel ready and eager to get started on our next set of projects. Over the next three months, we will be working within the user research team.
With a warm welcome, the team kicked off our placement with two days of in-person activities. We received a thorough overview of user research from presentations and testimonials, and even had our drama skills put to the test when we were asked to roleplay a realistic user research session – a fun, sometimes awkward but valuable experience!
We will continue to learn from the user research team by attending group meetings and holding discussions on our progress, but we will also each be shadowing one member of the team for a closer look into the day-to-day life of a user researcher. Once we get a grasp on our mentor’s ongoing work, they will ask us to assist in completing some manageable tasks.
Towards the end of our user research placement, we apprentices will once again join forces on a small, internal user research task. We hope to identify a challenge faced internally at the CDPS over the next few months and hope to collect some data which can be used to make a positive impact for staff. This will also give us an opportunity to apply the skills we acquire in a low-risk setting.
Additional training
During this placement, we will continue working on college assessments with a focus on accessibility and inclusivity. Covering topics such as improving readability, user research methods, and the impact of neurodiversity and visual impairment on digital accessibility, these assessments will ensure that our fundamental skills align with industry benchmarks as we progress through our placements.
We will also take part in some external training in digital accessibility, managing and influencing stakeholders, and a service design training. These courses will equip us with the general skills necessary for a successful career in UCD.
Looking ahead
Once we complete our user research placement, we will complete 3-month placements in interaction design, then service design. For the final six months of our qualification, we will choose our preferred area of UCD to continue a placement within that team or continue cycling through shorter placements. Once we achieve our level 3 qualification, we will have the option to continue our studies up to degree level, or we can choose to move into our UCD career.
Our overall goal is to emerge from this apprenticeship as well-rounded UCD professionals, armed with the skills and knowledge to readily integrate into established UCD teams or make a positive impact on the broader UCD community.