The Skills4Stem central focus is to provide personalised adaptive learning programs that dovetail into
current employment.

For employers, this meant creating programs where up to 70% of the learning takes place in the workplace. This practical application of tutored learning embeds knowledge straightaway, whilst ensuring resources are optimised on-site. Better to have an apprentice working directly on a project providing commercial value than having them stop away in a college classroom for days on end.

As a result, helping the apprentice learn became key. But all apprentices are not the same. With different learning styles, different lifestyle pressures and different outlooks, it soon became clear that for many, the battery hen approach to institutional education was not always the best way to bring on individuals.

This forms the basis of what we now call adaptive learning. Even before we take on an apprentice, we find out what makes them tick, what motivates them, their preferred learning style and what level they can operate at. By doing this, we then build a qualification around them and their employer, adapting the content in a modular way so they can learn faster or slower as the subject matter changes. And apprentices loved it, with a knock-on effect in employer engagement too.

What surprised everyone was that by taking this adaptive approach, more apprentices completed their qualifications and often much faster than through the institutional approach. Using the unique modular approach any unexpected absenteeism could easily be accommodated by rescheduling. You can’t do that at college, miss it and you miss it.

Now became a case of scalability.