Success story: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

Kensington and Chelsea is one of London’s most vibrant and recognisable boroughs. It has many unique buildings, famous museums and beautiful parks. Although the borough is geographically one of the smallest in London, at just over 4.7 square miles, it is one of the most densely populated and diverse areas in Europe. And let’s not forget, it is home to the world-famous Notting Hill Carnival!

The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) aims to provide high quality services to improve the lives of its residents and to make the borough a better place in which to live, work, and visit.

The Council has five directorates, including the Housing and Employment Services. This directorate offers one-to-one support to help its residents into work or training by providing guidance and advice with CVs, job searching, application forms, and interview practice, etc.

The RBKC has been a user of Access Personalised Learning since December 2019, with the career development platform launching early-January 2020.

More recently, the Council has been using Access Workspace. Access Workspace brings together all the moving parts of your organisation into a single digital workspace, to unite products, data and key processes in one place.

The cost-of-living crisis and financial hardship that the British economy is facing currently has had a significant impact on the job market, and subsequently the level of unemployment in the country. This has put increasing pressure on the Housing and Employment Services to provide support on unemployment, financial assistance and welfare benefits to its residents.

The Housing and Employment Services team therefore sought additional resources and support to enable the team to continue helping those externally that needed it.

The RBKC was already using Access Personalised Learning internally to help employees pursue their training and career progression goals. However, they recently discovered that the platform could offer the team additional opportunities and support.

Access Personalised Learning delivers a personalised environment to apply for jobs, create CVs, practice interviewing, take self-assessments, and learn from the hundreds of employability skills eLearning courses.

With these resources readily available, the Housing and Employment Services team have created a personalised environment – in addition to the one used internally – for residents to access and get support, referred to as the ‘Residents Careers Zone Portal’.

“Access Personalised Learning has been hugely beneficial internally. So, when the Housing and Employment Services team discovered that we could create an additional, dedicated space for our residents - one where we could select relevant career development resources and eLearning content - we were excited to explore this,” says Olivia Burke-McGhie, Employment Pathways Team Leader.

The team have been able to select from over 5,000 videos, eLearning assets, articles and interactive assessments for residents to use.

“We’ve been able to creatively tailor the platform for our residents, in a branding sense, but also in terms of highlighting relevant eLearning materials, so they get as much benefit as possible. With the resources in a variety of formats, we’ve been able to cater for all learning preferences. And because the eLearning materials can be accessed from any device, the residents can learn in their own time and own environment,” says Olivia.

“This particularly suits those who might not feel comfortable talking about sensitive topics, such as mental health in the workplace, but the support is available through the career development platform. Plus, with the plethora of content, which is added to weekly, there is always something new to learn. We’ve never come across anything like this before,” continues Olivia.

As Access Personalised Learning is configurable, the RBKC has been able to brand the ‘Residents Careers Zone Portal’ to look part of our team, with their branding, colours, logos, and imagery.

The RBKC has also been able to customise Access Personalised Learning to highlight relevant eLearning resources on the homepage. This includes topics like how to research employers, training on Microsoft Word, and the interactive tools such as the CV builder and interview simulator.

Discover the benefits a dedicated career development platform can bring to your organisation.

CV360 is an AI-powered CV scanner that enables the Housing and Employment Services team to provide personalised, high-quality CV support to their residents.

“The CV builder has significantly reduced the admin and time spent checking each individual CV, yet we can still continue to provide our residents with quality advice and guidance to support them in seeking employment opportunities,” says Olivia.

CV360 assesses a CV against over 50 criteria, including factors such as file quality, presentation, structure, content, language, and employability skills. The tool also offers unique assessments such as time-to-read, average sentence length, and skills dominance, and provides detailed feedback in seconds.

Similarly, the cover letter builder offers templates, examples, and guidance for creating effective cover letters and emails.

The interview training tool, Interview360, helps users to optimise their performance for in-person and video interviews.

“The interview simulator allows us to track and report on our resident’s progress. We can also use the tool to set tasks for the residents, which we can then discuss in our one-to-one meetings in preparation of going out into the competitive job market. The interview simulator is probably our favourite tool,” says Olivia.

Interview360 provides residents with:

• A real-life interview, based on actual content of each individual resident’s CV;
• Personalised mock interviews and practice questions;
• Instant and unique AI-powered feedback on body language, communication and speech, camera position and voice quality;
• Advice and guidance in 100+ interview training resources.

“The job searching tool is great. We can use it to really hone in on jobs – high quality jobs too – for example from The Guardian and Financial Times. And because all these jobs are in one, central location, the team no longer need to spend time searching through multiple job sites. It has significantly reduced the admin and manual work involved,” says Olivia.

The job search engine tool explores millions of jobs, in over 50 countries, across 90 occupations. Residents can set personal preferences of job titles, location, experience levels, and start dates.

Useful facts can also be viewed for each role, such as employment growth, average working hours, salaries, common tasks, and required qualifications.

In the first year since launching, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea have seen:

• 919 users sign up to Access Personalised Learning,
• 7,748 logins,
• 18,697 activities completed.

*These figures include both internal RBKC users, as well as residents.

“Since launching, we’ve created flyers and ran promotional campaigns to encourage sign up and raise awareness of the support and eLearning that can be accessed through Access Personalised Learning. But, it’s now so firmly embedded within our culture that we are registering all new employment clients onto the platform straight away, as it’s had such a positive impact on getting our residents back into employment,” says Olivia.

With the time savings made since the investment in Access Personalised Learning, the Housing and Employment Services team have not only been able to support an increase in residents but have been able to reallocate their time and efforts to focus on more value-add activities.

The RBKC can also run real-time reports to understand and track resident activity, trends, engagement, and improvements made in terms of the learning gained.

“We like that we don’t need to rely on/put pressure on our IT team or pay to outsource the creative work involved in designing eLearning content. We can continue maintaining our high levels of service and support to really help improve our residents’ lives,” says Olivia.

“Our relationship with Access People is really positive. It’s a true partnership. Our Customer Success Manager continuously provides us with quality support to ensure we are getting the most out of the career development platform. Nothing is too much to ask for,” says Olivia.

“We asked for support with creating a video to show our residents around Access Personalised Learning, top tips and hints, and how-to guidance. We were sent a 7-minute ish video which really went into detail. We were really impressed, as it not only saved the team time, but also ensured things were explained in the right way too,” concludes Olivia.

See Access Personalised Learning in action to experience all the functionality to take careers to the next level.

The Access Group's HCM division, Access People, offer an unrivalled suite of solutions for businesses, including HR and Payroll, Absence Management, Workforce Management, Compliance, Recruitment, Talent, Learning, Employee Benefits and Engagement, Health & Safety, all of which are underpinned by the powerful Access Workspace platform. 

The Access Group is one of the leading providers of business management software to small and mid-sized organisations in the UK, Ireland, and Asia Pacific. We help over 100,000 customers across commercial and not-for-profit sectors become more productive and efficient.