Connecting a trusted vocational authority with its learners

Overview

City & Guilds has long been recognised for its trusted qualifications and strong relationships with training centres and employers. Recent shifts in the skills landscape, including renewed investment in training, growing demand for trade certifications and rising learner expectations, highlighted a clear opportunity for the organisation to rethink how it supports people throughout their career journeys.

We partnered with City & Guilds to shape a new proposition that brings the organisation closer to learners in a more direct and meaningful way. This work builds on their established strengths while opening up new avenues for guidance, progression and long-term learner support.

Shaping a direction for the product

Through three project phases, we worked closely with City & Guilds to consolidate existing research, test early concept directions and refine the proposition into a clear, evidence-backed prototype. This work established a confident direction for what the experience should be called, why it matters, how the product should function, feel and grow.

Designing for real learner needs

We evolved the experience across three key qualification and career segments. We built content and user flows around skills, earnings insights, job relevance and personalised recommendations. The resulting prototype helps learners understand their strengths, compare income potential, explore job roles and identify the qualifications that can move them forward.

Testing and feedback

User testing showed strong engagement with core features such as personalised job listings, skills mapping and income comparison, which learners saw as directly relevant to their real-world decisions. Several spoke about how the platform helped them feel a sense of progress, with one noting, “I like how you can stack your qualifications. It makes you more proud of yourself.” Others highlighted the importance of earnings insight when making career choices: “everyone wants to know how much money they’re going to earn.”

These insights shaped the final refinements to the interface, content and positioning, ensuring the proposition stayed closely aligned with what learners find motivating and genuinely useful.

Commercial decision-making

As a business, undertaking any new initiative requires sound reasoning and modelling. We helped City and Guilds define what realistic commercial outcomes could be for the proposition. In doing this, our team held interview sessions with potential commercial and brand partners to help us better understand their motivations for involvement, what success could like through their eyes and, ultimately, how the proposition should be best positioned to grow. Similar to other phases of the project, all our findings and recommendations were refined and presented in a report, shared with the board.

A foundation for growth

The final deliverables give City & Guilds a confident sense of direction, a story that resonates, and a clear set of practical next steps across data, content, technology and phased launch planning. This proposition now sits at the heart of their learner growth strategy, ready to be developed and invested in as it moves forward.