Together with leading social enterprise organisation, The Wise Group, we’re lifting people out of poverty in Scotland. James Clark-Allen, Partnership Lead, talks about the power of a shared purpose, with summarised excerpts below of an article originally published in TechUK.
We may be the UK’s largest business services company and one of the largest IT organisations in the country but we’re absolutely committed to collaboration with SMEs. Capita Scaling Partner – our venture capital business unit - is just one example of this, where we rapidly accelerate and expand start-up firms with a disruptive model which takes the risk out of start-up investment.
Capita Scaling Partner helps early-stage Software as a Service businesses scale rapidly by providing targeted access to thousands of trusted corporate and government relationships. We then support, sell to, buy from, share learnings and collaborate with those SMEs every day to ensure they achieve tangible outcomes.
The Wise Group - a leading social enterprise working to lift people out of poverty - builds bridges to opportunity for the most vulnerable in society through mentoring support, employment, skills, and energy advice. We initially met the Wise Group team last year, and instantly connected to the culture, ethos and purpose of the organisation because it aligned so well with our own – doing good, supporting communities, and delivering better outcomes for citizens. We were jointly awarded the Department for Work and Pension’s JETS (Job Entry Targeted Support) Scotland contract and we believe we achieved this because of our shared organisational values and vision – ultimately to lift people out of poverty. We then rolled out the programme throughout the pandemic lockdown.
Codis is another collaboration success story – together with the Wise Group, and Salesforce we created a unique and intuitive platform especially for the needs of JETS stakeholders in Scotland. Close alliance between our organisations ensured early glitches were quickly resolved, and the resulting solution is re-setting the bar in employability software. When designing CODIS, Scotland was in the midst of strict lockdown, so the web platform was built with a rich digital, mobile-first user experience in mind. We also delivered all training on the Codis self-serve web platform (used by all JETS Scotland employability trainers and participants) remotely. Since the data and analytics are owned by Capita, and the qualitative responses and feedback are received by the Wise Group, collaboration is vital in order to continuously refine the platform and ensure it remains relevant as the needs of JETS participants evolve over the post-pandemic months and years.
As stated by the Wise Group’s Digital Engagement Lead, Natasha Radmehr, “Codis has so much to offer participants. Not only can they use it to record and practice remote and virtual interviews, but they can then get tailored feedback on how they performed in each session. There’s also a mental health and wellbeing section to Codis, and this is crucial to us as JETS is about so much more than jobs, but overall wellbeing.”
Collaboration has been fundamental to the success of the JETS Scotland programme - it’s been a joy working with the Wise Group and all partners because it’s clear we’re all working with a shared purpose and genuinely care about the programme’s success. As long as that continues, I’ve no doubt that JETS in Scotland will be even more successful as we proceed together.
