Skills-Third Sector is developing a website where charitable organisations can purchase training from providers and share their experiences, with the launch planned for September.
The Skills Platform, which is being developed with a two-year £1m investment from the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, had a consultation in early 2012 and will now go through its final design process during the summer.
“It will be a marketplace, functioning much the same way as a site like Amazon,” said chief executive of Skills-Third Sector Keith Mogford, speaking exclusively to civilsociety.co.uk.
“Employers and organisations from the sector will act as consumers, able to browse and search for training and development opportunities and make informed comparisons and choices then purchase directly through the platform.
“As well as the marketplace, we also plan that the platform will have functions where people can freely share resources that have proved useful to them, such as in discussion forums.”
Mogford gave the example of a small voluntary organisation in one part of the country posing a skills problem, and then a similar organisation operating elsewhere answering to say that it has faced and dealt with that same problem, and offering to pass on a free training resource.
He said Skills-Third Sector’s plan is to create an online community based around skills and training, with a target of having at least 250 training providers on board ready for the launch, including “many key organisations from the sector.”
The platform will be run and regulated by Skills-Third Sector, with the organisation currently looking to contract with an IT agency for the build of the platform.
Addressing market failure
The genesis of the project came from a skills survey Skills-Third Sector carried out with sector organisations in 2010.
“What came out from the survey were four priority areas for skills development,” Mogford said. “Impact and evaluation analysis; governance and leadership; business skills (marketing, financial management and so on); and volunteer management. Although this was three years ago, these are still prevalent, with digital skills emerging as another notable concern.
“But what also came out was a sense of failure in the training market in the sector – you had a lot of organisations that had a training budget and were committing that budget, but were reporting that they often found it difficult to find training that was specific for their needs. They might purchase training that didn’t turn out to be value for money or quite meet their needs.”
The Skills Platform will have user reviews as well as a number of other quality indicators that will help to inform purchasing decisions, such as whether the provider is NCVO approved. And Mogford says that providers will be similarly helped, after many had told the 2010 survey that the “diverse and fragmented” nature of the voluntary sector can make it hard to know how to get their training onto the market.
Expanding into other sectors
A condition of the UK Commission for Employment and Skills’ £1m funding – given through its Growth and Innovation Fund – is that the after the two years the platform will be sustainable and self-funding, via the percentage Skills-Third Sector will receive from training providers who sell through it.
And if successful, Mogford sees expansion into other sectors as a real possibility.
“We see all sorts of opportunities,” he said. “As well as it continuing to grow within the sector, I’d hope that over time the platform may well have applications in other sectors: the public, the private.
"We have an objective to make sure it works for the charitable sector first and foremost; if there are wider opportunities longer term, of course we’ll look at them.”
Mogford added that if successful after the first two years, there could also be scope to use the platform for purposes beyond just skills and training, such as commissioning and tendering contracts in other areas.
Potential users of the Platform can share their views on skills and training here.
