Digitalisation for Further Education providers
Located at the heart of the local business community,
further education (FE) colleges can use Shoestring to
bring digital innovation into companies.
By collaborating with Shoestring FE colleges can improve their business development offering in the region and contribute further to economic growth. The resources can help enhance both their apprentices’ and T level students’ business impact on their company, providing meaningful work placement experiences. Combined with employee bootcamps, Shoestring gives FE providers a hands-on training programme that can improve a company’s productivity as well as develop the participant’s role.
Activities
FE Colleges can incorporate a range of activities into their existing offering to improve the technical and leadership skills of both the future and current workforce.
The activities featured below illustrate what is available:
Digital skills bootcamps
Incorporate Shoestring in your digital skills bootcamps for employees from local companies. Give participants hands on digital skills, teaching them to use low-cost technologies to create solutions in their workplace that bring immediate business benefits.
Mentored self-start programmes
Promote to your apprentice companies who could purchase a programme. The company will choose a starter solution that provides business benefits and involves your apprentice learning to build and deploy the solution, creating business impact which can contribute to their Units of Competency.
Digital needs awareness workshop
Host a workshop with your local companies and discover what their top business needs are, the low-cost digital solution areas that could address them and the available starter solutions that can be accessed via the Mentored self-start programme.
In-company workshop or survey
Business development and apprentice staff can complete this with local employers when they visit and walk the production line. They will help companies identify low-cost technology solutions for their business challenges, and show how apprentices can help build and deploy low-cost digital solutions which can save energy, time and money.
Hackathons
Use the industry challenges that your local companies face to task groups of students, apprentices, employees to solve using low-cost digital solutions. This could be run as a training programme for World Skills.
Digital skills modules
Teach your students and apprentices how to build a Shoestring starter solution, as part of a module or their student project. This helps prepare them for meaningful work experience where they can bring value immediately to their company.
Case study:
See how an apprentice used Shoestring approaches and helped their company save thousands of pounds on energy.
Get involved
Join us in our mission to help FE colleges incorporate and develop Shoestring’s offerings to help them build business plans to bring innovation into SMEs, and support curriculum delivery and work placements. Working across regions, with regional organisations, local authorities, chambers of commerce and sector groups, we aim to provide Shoestring programmes that help leverage the power of regional networks through collaboration with Shoestring.
We have seen how Shoestring helps empower apprentices, giving them skills and also the ability to help demonstrate the impact they have in a company to senior leaders. We have also seen how a bootcamp helped five students at an FE college in Scotland deliver their student project during Covid.
Get in touch to see how to get started
