Discovery on digital skills and leadership in adult social care in partnership with Skills for Care

We worked in partnership with Skills for Care on two distinct, but linked discovery projects about the adult social care sector in England. 

The first discovery explored digital leadership within adult social care providers. The second investigated the state of digital skills amongst the workforce.

The Skills for Care team wanted to conduct user research to gather evidence about digital leadership and digital skills in the sector, to determine how well user needs in these areas are being met, and to identify what further support might be required.

In collaboration with Skills for Care, for both discoveries we engaged with a range of stakeholders and users through one-to-one interviews, persona interviews and concept feedback sessions. 

For the digital leadership discovery we conducted research with 9 registered managers, 10 company directors and chief executives, as well as 3 senior roles with operational responsibilities. For the digital skills discovery, we spoke with 13 frontline care staff, 7 learning and development managers, admin staff and an individual employer.

Given that these were not discoveries about specific incumbent or prospective digital services, creating concepts for participant feedback presented an interesting challenge. However, we were able to adapt the way that we typically run prototype testing sessions to suit both discoveries.

We concluded each discovery with a backlog of prioritised user needs, key research findings, and a set of recommendations supported by the user feedback from our simple concept testing.

These outputs are now being used by the Skills for Care team as part of their ongoing work to strengthen and support the sector’s digital leadership, and improve digital skills across the adult social care workforce. 

“The research outputs helped us to quickly build a business case and get additional funding from NHS X to deliver a digital skills framework for the adult social care sector.”

Kevin Pyatt, Director of Digital Transformation, Skills for Care