From good to great — the transformation of BPP through technology
Jo Wickremasinghe, Chief Product & Technology Officer
I’ve been working in digital product development for more than 20 years. I’ve had fantastic opportunities throughout my career to lead digital product teams at organisations of different size, scale and scope. From pure play technology companies like Microsoft, to a few stints in massive scale media organisations like the BBC and News UK. I spent a stint at Babylon Health and learnt that ‘Blitzscaling’ was not for me. And I learnt a huge amount leading product teams in a private equity backed, property portal business, significantly impacted by the housing market shutdown during Covid, and then hampered by a recession and rising interest rates.
And now my journey has brought me to this amazing opportunity to lead the digital transformation at BPP, a top provider of professional education for over 47 years. BPP Education has had significant growth in recent years, expanding from its long history in law and accountancy qualifications, to providing a broad range of programmes and courses including nursing, technology, professional development, and management; via short courses, apprenticeships and university degrees; and delivered through both face to face and digital learning.
Our students love learning with BPP. The learning programmes, content, tutors and coaches are second to none. But like many heritage organisations, the investment and expertise in BPP’s technology hasn’t kept up with the pace of growth of the business. BPP was acquired by new owners in 2021, who saw the great potential in the organisation for continued growth but realised investment was needed in digital platforms and systems to better support clients, students and staff on that journey.
I joined BPP in November 2022 to begin this digital transformation. Starting in January, we began hiring a new Product & Technology team —bringing in a wealth of experience from tech companies with track records in modern digital development to the education space. Over the past nine months we have grown the Product & Technology team to over 100 people, with 10 product teams starting to deliver a major evolution to our digital products and services.
For students, we will redevelop the end to end student experience, improving all digital experiences that learners have online, from application to how they access their timetable, how they manage their learning and see their progress and how they get their results — all digitally enabled with a better experience. We will grow our use of machine learning and AI to develop personalised learning pathways and feedback for students that will help improve their learning outcomes. And we will explore how we can leverage Generative AI to support students, tutors and staff, and help them to benefit from the fast pace of innovation in this space, whilst providing the rigour and scrutiny required to keep their data private and safe.
All of these improvements for students will lead to better outcomes for our clients too. We will have even better quality data to share with our clients and we will improve all aspects of the client experience from bookings to on-boarding students, reporting on student progress to clients, and improvements to billing and invoicing.
And this will all be built on a modern digital architecture leveraging cloud services, modern languages, source control, continuous integration and continuous delivery, shifting left with testing automation and security testing, and following industry leading devops practices to help improve the speed and quality of delivery. We are hiring and investing in great talent who are helping us become a high performing, accountable and empowered Product & Technology organisation.
We hope you’ll follow our journey, as we share our experience of taking BPP Education from good to great through a digital transformation.
