2021
Brussels
Government
Service design
On the road to lifelong learning
Challenge
The Department of WSE asked The Argonauts, in collaboration with Idea Consult, to develop customer journeys around the learning intentions of citizens. The following goals were set:
- Better understand why citizens decide to go back to learning → identify the learning needs
- Provide insights into what steps/actions citizens take before participating in a learning activity.
- Providing insights into the factors that facilitate participation in lifelong learning → motivation
- Providing insights into the barriers citizens experience when deciding to participate, and understanding which barriers are identified as reasons why they ultimately decide not to participate in a learning activity
- Understand better the opportunities and barriers training suppliers experience when preparing and offering training courses to citizens.
- Identifying opportunities and potential policy interventions to better support training suppliers and citizens in their pre-learning journey.
Approach & results
This project was not approached in the typical research way, for this we used a co-creative approach, using service design tools such as persona’s and customer journey mapping.
In the first step, we searched through various channels for people with very different profiles and backgrounds. From these, about 40 respondents were selected with whom one-to-one interviews were set up.
For the supply side, we interviewed about 30 training suppliers from both the public and private sector. These interviews were then transcribed and coded by a pool of students from different universities.
Based on this information, we created different personas of both “learners” and training suppliers which were used to develop detailed customer journeys in co-creation with the project team. These customer journeys serve as a basis for mapping thresholds and opportunities so that the policy can take the necessary measures to encourage more citizens to engage in lifelong learning.
Result
Finally a report was delivered to the department with recommendations on how to improve the customer journey and experience of citizens that consider to follow a training course. Final goal is to encourage people to become ‘lifelong learners’ and to better adapt the training offering to the needs of citizens.
