Lead UX Designer across three products for Smart Apprentices — now part of Advanced. Digital CV, Smart SEPA, and Smart VLE form a suite of tools transforming how the UK delivers and manages apprenticeship programmes.
Visual designs and proprietary platform details cannot be shared under the terms of this engagement. The process, contributions, and outcomes documented here reflect my actual work across all three products.
Smart Apprentices — now part of Advanced — provides digital management tools for UK apprenticeship providers, training organisations, and employers. The platform suite supports the full lifecycle of apprenticeship delivery: from matching learners with employers, through programme management and compliance, to end-point assessment.
As Lead UX Designer, I owned the research, strategy, interface design, and usability testing across three of the company's core products. Each presented distinct challenges — and together they represent the most comprehensive multi-product design engagement of my career.
A school leaver with no work experience has very little to put on a CV. Digital CV was designed to change what an apprenticeship application could look like — and to make the matching process work for both sides.
The challenge was twofold. For young people just finishing school, the traditional CV format disadvantages them immediately — they haven't had jobs, so the document is thin. For employers and training providers looking to fill apprenticeship places, finding the right candidate across a wide geographic area was time-consuming and inconsistent.
Digital CV reframed the application document around skills, qualifications, location, and potential — creating rich profiles that gave employers a much fuller picture of a candidate than a blank work history ever could.
Designed an intuitive profile-building journey for young people — many using it for the first time, some with limited digital confidence. The interface progressively disclosed information fields, starting with the simple and building to the nuanced, to avoid overwhelming new users at the entry point.
Designed the employer interface for searching apprentice profiles by location, qualifications, and availability. Employers could filter their candidate pool and communicate directly through the platform — replacing fragmented email chains with a structured, auditable in-app conversation.
A key employer pain point was uncertainty about the financial incentives available for taking on an apprentice. I designed a funding calculator tool within the employer view that estimated the government funding an employer could receive based on candidate age, qualification level, and programme type — turning a barrier into an incentive to engage.
End-point assessment involves multiple parties — the apprentice, their assessor, their training provider, and their employer. Without a shared platform, the process becomes a chain of emails, missed updates, and compliance risk.
Smart SEPA (Smart End-Point Assessment) was designed to be the single source of truth for the EPA process. Every party involved in an apprentice's assessment needed to see the same information, at the same time, with no ambiguity about where in the process the apprentice currently sat.
The design challenge was to build an interface that served the needs of organisations (training providers managing large cohorts) and individuals (apprentices navigating their own assessment) within the same system — without exposing each group to unnecessary complexity.
Designed an automated notification and communications layer that kept all parties informed as the apprentice progressed through assessment stages. Milestone alerts, deadline reminders, and status updates were triggered by platform events — significantly reducing the administrative burden on training coordinators who had previously managed this manually.
Built integrity controls into the assessor assignment workflow to flag and prevent conflicts of interest — situations where an assessor had a prior relationship with the apprentice or their employer. The system cross-referenced relationships before confirming assignments and required documented justification for any override, creating a transparent audit trail.
Designed management interfaces for assessment organisations to manage their assessor pool, schedule assessment sessions, and track cohort-level progress. The dashboard gave coordinators an at-a-glance view of assessment pipeline health — flagging at-risk timelines before they became compliance failures.
Not every apprentice learns at the same pace or with the same knowledge gaps. Smart VLE was designed to identify exactly where each learner needed support and guide them directly to the relevant training material.
Smart VLE is an adaptive virtual learning environment that supports apprenticeships, NVQs, and traineeships. It enables the creation, delivery, and automatic marking of knowledge tests — removing manual marking overhead for trainers while giving learners immediate feedback.
The central design problem was the gap between what a learner needed and what they were actually accessing. Learners were working through training material linearly, regardless of their existing knowledge — wasting time on content they didn't need and missing content they did. Smart VLE was designed to close that gap.
Designed an initial assessment experience that identified each learner's knowledge baseline across the programme's knowledge units. Results were used to personalise the learning pathway — surfacing modules the learner genuinely needed while letting them progress past content they'd already demonstrated mastery of.
The system recommended and sequenced training resources based on each learner's diagnostic results and ongoing progress. Resources included video content, written materials, and interactive assessments — all mapped to the knowledge, skills, and behaviour (KSB) framework standards the apprentice was working towards.
Designed the knowledge test experience with automatic marking — giving learners immediate results and feedback explanations, and feeding completion data directly to trainer dashboards. Trainers could see cohort-level performance across knowledge units, identifying common gaps that warranted additional group sessions rather than individual interventions.
"It found out what I didn't know and showed me exactly what to do next. It didn't just throw everything at me."— Apprentice usability testing participant, engineering programme
Working as Lead UX Designer across Digital CV, SEPA, and Smart VLE simultaneously required a discipline I hadn't fully exercised before: the ability to hold three distinct user mental models in parallel, and to resist cross-contaminating design decisions between products that served very different needs.
The consistent thread across all three was the importance of reducing administrative friction. In UK apprenticeship delivery, the administrative burden on training providers is enormous — and every design decision that reduced even a small amount of that burden had a disproportionate impact on the people actually delivering the programmes.
I came away from this engagement with a much deeper understanding of the apprenticeship sector and a conviction that good UX in compliance-heavy environments is not about simplifying away complexity — it's about absorbing that complexity into the system so that users never have to see it.
Data / SaaS · Dashboard Design · Microsoft Platform