"Careers in Digital" at Barnsley College
- Alexa Sielaff
- Mar 4
- 2 min read
Updated: Mar 24
This is the fantastic work produced by 38 of Barnsley College’s first year students at one of our “Careers in Digital” workshops.
The key thrust of these sessions is dividing the students up into teams and setting Challenge Briefs - supplied by Chris Savage at Barnsley Council, this time around - then coaching them through the process of responding, including:
Research / discovery
Brainstorming
Refining one idea
Building a pitch
Pitching their refined idea to the rest of the group
Bit of a whistle stop - this was all less than three hours work - but the outputs were worthy of putting in front of clients.
Some really well researched problems (phone calls to family and friends, talking to each other, sharing opinions) and thought out ideas, which we’ll be sharing with Barnsley Council after half term.
In this pic you’ll find:
User / audience profiles
Empathy maps
User stories
User / customer journeys
KPIs, targets and tracking
All of which were created by the students and a lot of which we didn’t ask for specifically. We set the end objective and mentored, but the students just ran with it.
Students linked the briefs together, thinking about a bigger picture, rather than simply focussing the individual brief they chose. They showed their working - making assumptions along the way and calling them out. They created brand names, logos and promotional collateral. And they used both sides of the paper, too.
Impressive stuff!
These students are only five weeks into their first year and the two groups didn’t know each other before meeting for this session. It took a while to warm up (Rock, Paper, Scissors - thanks Andy Hanselman and Jill White at Andy Hanselman Consulting), but as soon as they were in their teams, it all just started to flow.
Thanks to Jo Kyte-Sharp and Laura Holliday-Mynett at Barnsley College for having us. Enjoy your half term break.
And well done to Ashanee, Aleksandra and 🌳Ross for delivering another awesome student employee encounter.
