Shout Out Portal: Bridging the Education-Careers gap in Tees Valley
Tees Valley Careers has long been bridging the gap between education and employment. We currently help 70+ local schools and colleges map their careers provision against the Gatsby benchmarks and identify where additional support and employer input is required. As part of our #StayLocalGoFar campaign, we also aim to connect 100,000 young people with local employers, showcasing the wealth of careers in the region and encouraging them to find local jobs when they enter the labour market.
When Tees Valley Careers first launched, connecting schools and employers involved manually sorting requests from schools for employer engagement (and vice versa) before emailing the relevant parties and logging responses in a spreadsheet. This was understandably inefficient and difficult to track. So, five years ago, when Tees Valley Combined Authority invested £3 million into careers, we saw an opportunity to digitise the engagement process and grabbed it. The result, our Shout Out Portal, streamlines how we connect employers with schools and colleges. But it has also become so much more.
Developing a portal to foster connections across the region
The decision to develop a new portal was the easy part. The challenge was getting it up and running. We started by conducting focus groups to identify stakeholder needs. Local businesses, for instance, said that they felt bombarded by the number of support requests and wanted greater control over what they saw. The digital agency we hired helped us through six months of engagement, development, data migration, and user testing, and the Tees Valley Shout Out Portal launched in September 2020.
Digitising the manual process allows schools to upload requests for employer engagement and for employers to browse and respond. While it mirrors our manual system, automating the coordination and tracking eliminates the need for time-consuming data entry. Employers can also post shout outs and filter requests by activity type, location, and age group, making it easier to select relevant opportunities.
Meanwhile, the portal offers new reporting functionality for careers leaders, They can now attend senior leadership meetings, for instance, with a pie chart highlighting key shout out statistics, which employers have responded, and so on. Since all the schools and colleges in our network have different capacities, the portal offers each one a different level of support. But all of our schools actively use and value it.
The portal has helped the Tees Valley Careers Hub. We now have a transparent overview of which businesses support which schools and colleges and how. The reporting functionality has been transformative. Besides saving time, it helps us identify less-engaged employers so we can encourage them to get more involved. And by exploring requests made by schools, we can refine our business recruitment strategy and target underrepresented sectors. We wouldn’t be without it.
Unexpected impacts of the portal
Since launching the Shout Out Portal, we have seen several additional, unanticipated impacts, including:
- Greater employer interest: The portal makes it easier for employers to get involved, regardless of how much time they want to commit. When new business partners are unsure about how to begin with careers engagement, we simply direct them to the portal to look around. This soft-touch approach has boosted the number of employers supporting Tees Valley Careers.
- Enterprise Advisor recruitment: Based on their activity, our team can identify and approach the most engaged employers to see if they’d like to become Enterprise Advisors, helping with activities like mentoring.
- Broader relationship building: Connections between schools and employers on the portal often lead to further opportunities, such as guest speaker sessions or other initiatives extending beyond the original engagement.
- Social value beyond careers support: Tees Valley Combined Authority is involved with many large-scale projects. When local businesses build or invest in new facilities or factories, for instance, they often have a statutory requirement to engage with schools as part of their social value commitment. The portal allows them to do that.
Looking to the future
To our knowledge, the Shout Out portal is the first of its kind and it has transformed how we operate. Since promoting it through regional and national events via our partnership with The Careers & Enterprise Company, other Combined Authorities have expressed interest in similar solutions. We have supported two of them in the development of their own versions of a Shout Out Portal.
It became clear to us early on that the portal was more than the sum of its parts. The system’s multifunctionality is its strength and we continue to evolve and develop it. Emerging use cases include teachers using it to bring employers remotely into lessons to demonstrate the relevance of their subject to local careers. We’re also starting to do some light touch work with primary schools. We also regularly encourage our colleagues within the wider Tees Valley Combined Authority to promote the portal to the businesses they work with. This could potentially lead to some interesting new use cases that we haven’t considered yet. In short, the possibilities go far beyond our initial vision.
But the best measure of success is that, since launching in 2020, over 500 school and employer events have been logged on the portal. Those 500 events have helped countless young people to explore the abundance of exciting career opportunities across the Tees Valley, inspiring them to see that a fruitful career in the region is entirely theirs for the taking, proving they can Stay Local, Go Far. That alone makes the entire endeavour worthwhile.
Andrea Naylor is Business Solutions Manager/Careers Hubs Lead
Janine Armstrong is Careers Co-ordinator at Tees Valley Combined Authority.
