How can we help more young people access better green jobs? This is the question that we have been tackling at IFOW as we have worked on Flourish, designed to give young people better insights into their skills, but also to connect them with relevant training opportunities. Central to its development has been our community research, bringing the voices of young people, firms and career support organisations right to the fore, from the inception of the product.

Our focus has initially been on Lincolnshire and Cornwall – two places in very different parts of the UK that share common histories of industrial decline and pockets of deprivation, but also huge opportunities in the growing green energy sector.

Importantly though, they are also places where we have existing connections into skills and training networks, and established relationships with those who are embedded in those communities. For us, having these partnerships in place has been key to understanding the unique challenges and opportunities young people face within these regions.

There was already a huge amount of research behind the project. As part of our annual Good Work Monitor, we analysed data on productivity and six dimensions of ‘good work’ across all 203 local authorities in England, Scotland and Wales. This has, over time, highlighted Lincolnshire and Cornwall as places where access to good-quality jobs is a challenge.

We have also been running the multi-year Pissarides Review into the Future of Work and Wellbeing, led by Nobel Prize-winning labour market economist (and IFOW co-founder), Professor Sir Christopher Pissarides. As part of this work, we used data from tens of millions of job ads to identify changes to skills demands and skills clusters across different regions. We also created the country’s first ‘Disruption Index’, tracking everything from venture capital flows to the availability of 5G to map how technological transformation is progressing, and how ‘ready’ regions are for this period of rapid change.

All of these aggregated and analysed datasets pointed to Lincolnshire and Cornwall as places where there were real challenges for young people looking to access better jobs, and huge potential opportunities in the emerging green sector.

So – job done, right?! We’d crunched the numbers and knew where the issues were. Let's crack on, build Flourish and start getting people matched with training providers and employers!

Actually... no. Another key dimension to the Pissarides Review was looking to understand what makes the adoption of new technologies go well. This was based on a survey of 1000 UK firms, and of 5000 UK employees, as well as numerous in-depth case studies. What came through very clearly was that if a new technology is going to lead to better outcomes, those who are going to be using it need to be at the heart of its design, development and deployment.

Within IFOW more generally, this has informed the development of our Good Work Algorithmic Impact Assessment (GWAIA) - a tool for centring the voices of workers in process of technology adoption. This framework has then been used in firms to guide how they bring in AI and algorithmic management tools so that job quality and wellbeing are protected. Working with the CIPD, we are engaged in a large project to operationalise this framework across a number of different sectors.

Coming to our Ufi Voc-Tech project then, we knew that it would be vital to the success of Flourish to centre the voices and experiences of young people, firms and those working in career support services, right through the design and development process. To do this, the team agreed on principles that would guide our work and the development of the platform. This included being:

• ‍Locally-led. Each area is unique and has its own opportunities and barriers for the green sector. Flourish is therefore led and shaped by the local communities that will benefit from the green transition.
• ‍Relationship-centred. We did not start with the goals of the platform, but the relationships that will make this work successful.
• ‍Safe and ethical. We take care to ensure the safety of those participating and to gather informed consent across our research. Education, work and careers are complicated topics with strong connections to our identity and sense of self. We follow a trauma-informed approach where people feel able to share and contribute what they are comfortable with.
• ‍Building on what’s known. We’re not starting from a blank page. We want to build on the work that local organisations have been doing, as well as what wider research is telling us to, create a platform that is relevant and effective.
• ‍A whole-system response. We strive for the empowerment of young people to shape the work futures that work for them, while connected and supported by wider system stakeholders.

This approach is based on the ‘action-research’ methodology, which combines the investigation of a problem with a reflection on actions for those involved in the process. With a community action-research approach, this meant multiple visits to different sites in Cornwall and Lincolnshire to spend time with young people – both to listen to their experiences, but simultaneously to help them begin self-reflecting too, so that actions could arise naturally for them as they participated. We achieved this through a carefully designed workshop structure that both sought to help us understand better the challenges that young people faced, but also to help them challenge their own thinking and reflect on their own futures of work.

Similarly, we have worked with community organisations, such as East Marsh United and Youth Engagement Programme (YEP!) to support those within the community that have experienced barriers to employment to become community researchers. By supporting these individuals to lead research activities with their peers, we are not only getting deeper insights into the challenges faced within the community, but we are also building capacity and providing opportunities to develop their skills, which will be applicable across jobs and sectors. Given the aims of Flourish, this approach has felt authentic and allowed us to support communities from the outset of our product development.

By using this approach, we have come across experiences we never anticipated when starting out. For example, when deploying the workshop with a group of young people in Cornwall just finishing training in car maintenance, they very quickly let us know how much they hated electric cars, and that they felt that the drive to net zero was really about a big tech agenda. Thankfully, we had workshop leads with significant experience in educational settings who knew that, in these situations, you work with the resistance, not against it. This surfaced a very significant issue for these young men – that ‘green’ technologies felt like just another attempt to disenfranchise them. “We like s**t-boxes that make a lot of noise,” they said. “EVs don’t make noise, they don’t smell, and you don’t get your hands dirty.” In short, they were a vehicle for them to express their feelings of not having a voice, of feeling abandoned by a big economic system.

Datasets alone don’t get you these stories. ‘User research’ is a well-established field in app design, but with Flourish we wanted to marry that with findings from our research about the importance of listening to the highly localised stories of the communities that we are hoping Flourish will support. With so many in these communities feeling disenfranchised by existing structures and by new technologies, it felt vital to the success of the project to take this approach.

Hopefully, in the work that other projects in the cohort are doing, there’s something here that could enrich your own approaches too. We look forward to hearing more in the coming months.