Building the foundations for a more diverse digital workforce
Co-op Foundation’s Federation Programme, supported by Luminate, is empowering people across Greater Manchester to challenge the ways in which technology and data reinforce inequalities. It’s a collaborative programme that supports social enterprises, activist organisations, charities and communities to grow the impact of their work.
The programme’s capacity building activities aimed to develop and strengthen the skills, processes or resources that help sustain organisations working towards more responsible and equitable design and use of tech. Nine organisations received capacity building funding through the Federation programme, including Diverse & Equal.
Introducing Diverse & Equal
Diverse & Equal is a tech for good organisation. Its mission is to use tech as a vehicle to create a fair society for everyone. They do this through their social enterprise DiverseTech, offering free training to talented adults from Black and under-represented backgrounds, equipping them with the skills to fulfil crucial digital roles, where there is often a skills shortage. Alongside this, Diverse & Equal works with digital businesses helping them to embed cultures that embrace and celebrate difference so that the organisation, and all the people who work there, can thrive — regardless of their background.
Where Diverse & Equal wanted to build capacity
DiverseTech activities are provided free of charge to participants. To ensure that these services could be sustained, Diverse & Equal needed support for process improvement to streamline processes and make them more efficient. This covered the whole service and user journey including promotion, sign-up, registration, onboarding, delivery, facilitation, follow-up. They also wanted to ensure that their training was meeting the needs of participants and industry.
Some of the improvements they made include:
- Creating templates for promotion, advertising and facilitating.
- Building relationships with community partners for promoting skills development opportunities.
- A/B testing of automated reminders to increase attendance.
- Creation of a database to assess suitability for the bootcamp and send push notifications to potential candidates.
- Reworking bootcamp content to ensure that it was deliverable by a range of facilitators.
Where capacity building led
As well as improving their processes, Diverse & Equal took on board feedback from previous participants, which led to the development of two new general taster sessions. This increased interest and built a stronger pipeline for people who were interested in attending a more intense bootcamp.
They also conducted research with partners and past bootcamp students to see where they might be able to make improvements to bootcamps. They found that the learning needed to:
- Be more structured around the Government Digital Service Standard. Whilst the teaching was already aligned with this, it was not explicitly stated. They made slight amendments to terminology and designed, tested and added some specific modules to strengthen the students’ knowledge.
- Have a smoother pathway into work. They introduced industry experience into the bootcamp, where cohorts were paid to work on a live project.
Learning and impact
Due to their business model, Diverse & Equal had assumed that using a capacity building grant to directly raise funds, for example through bid writing, would be the solution to making their free bootcamp provision more sustainable. However, following exploration and testing, they quickly recognised the impact of improvements to their processes, which helped them to be more efficient and effective. Refinements to their taster to bootcamp feeder process delivered a 216% increase in bootcamp applications and higher number of suitable candidates.
Diverse & Equal’s third bootcamp was sponsored by Nexer Digital. There is more information about their partnership in this post from the Responsible Tech Collective. Nine students were hired into digital roles within two weeks of completing the Nexer sponsored course. Eight of these went to Nexer, with five going into mid-level roles, two into junior roles with a view to be mid-level within six months, and one junior level.
Overall, 100% of Diverse & Equal’s bootcamp students have been from under-represented backgrounds:
- 61% are Black
- 58% identify as female
Their students range between 23–50+ with an average age in the mid-30s. Completion and employment rates are high:
- 97.5% of enrolled participants complete their bootcamp
- 82% graduate
- 56% find employment in the digital sector
- 78% of those employed going into mid-level roles
Through the outcomes and impact Diverse & Equal’s work has had, they have gained a strong reputation for successfully re-skilling people. More organisations and potential participants are now reaching out and are interested in working with them. They were invited to speak at the launch of Bloomberg Black In Tech EMEA in October, and participated in a tech startup roundtable after the launch of the Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology (CFIT), following an invitation from HM Treasury and the City of London Corporation.
What’s coming next
Diverse & Equal is in the process of planning for the year ahead, however the improvements that have been put in place will serve them well for a long time into the future.
It is launching an end-to-end service, which is an alternative to internal academies. For this, they will source skilled career changers, re-skill, onboard and provide support to help with retention. The roles it will focus on are for user centred product and service design teams.
You can find out more about Diverse & Equal’s continuing impact or get in touch to explore partnerships or training via their website, LinkedIn, Instagram or Twitter.
This post was collaboratively prepared by Diverse & Equal, and Paper Frogs, a delivery partner working on the Federation programme. The Federation programme is a Co-op Foundation partnership supported by Luminate, running since 2018. Phase one of the programme ran until Spring 2021 and was designed to look at the impacts of technology on society. Phase two builds on successes and learning from phase one. Its focus is on upholding data and digital rights and tackling inequality. The Federation programme runs until June 2023.
