QA Higher Education (QAHE) is dedicated to expanding access to high-quality education and enhancing employment prospects for a diverse array of domestic and international students. Serving over 12,000 students annually, QAHE relies on a disparate range of digital services, from welfare appointment bookings and scheduling across multiple intakes, to online lectures for evening and weekend learners. QAHE collaborates with seven university partners to deliver programmes tailored for non-traditional students, including mature domestic learners and international students, who often balance work with their studies.

Partnership with Unthinkable

For several years, Unthinkable has been working with QAHE to provide support in strategy, learning design and product development. This collaboration initially focused on creating a blended learning model for QAHE's degree programs, culminating in the launch of a minimum viable product (MVP) — an employability-focused short course, "Navigating Your Career," which debuted in late 2023.

Project Overview

Working to QAHE’s CEO, in late 2023 Unthinkable undertook a project to define the core proposition that would unify QAHE's digital initiatives, enhancing their ability to deliver strong outcomes for a diverse student body and meet the needs of existing and prospective partners. We assembled a specialised team with expertise in product strategy, learning design, user experience, data, and digital strategy to tackle this challenge.

Exploration and Prioritisation

The project began with a broad exploration, involving stakeholder consultations and a review of existing initiatives to identify strategic opportunities and challenges. Two key priorities emerged: improving graduate outcomes and employability, and integrating data across services.

Developing the Digital Proposition

To explore how we might address graduate outcomes, the team analysed success metrics, current services, barriers to success, and student needs. Based on this analysis, we identified a potential pathfinder product aimed at accelerating digital transformation: the 'course companion' service. Three parallel streams of work followed:

Student Experience Mapping: The team mapped course companion touchpoints across a typical student's journey and visualised these through storyboards.
Data Utilisation: To counter the delay in graduate outcome data (typically gathered 18 months after graduation), we proposed leading indicators of employability and mapped these to the course companion service, making it data-generative.
Delivery Planning: We developed a high-level roadmap, outlining the activities and sequencing required for rolling out the course companion service across selected courses. We also made recommendations for the composition of a product delivery team, as well as exploring practicalities like integration with QAHE's current course portfolio, initial data improvements, and cross-functional team collaboration.

Defining the spec

This led to a second phase of work to refine the content, tools, and people required to deliver the proposed service. This work divided into three strands:

We selected and reviewed a pilot course, auditing the current materials versus employability outcomes, and creating a draft skills taxonomy to underpin this.
We did further service design work, mapping out key interactions and identifying the critical components of the service: course adaptation, skills portfolio tooling, and mentorship provision.
We explored technology and data integration, evaluating existing tools and proposing how current and new components could be integrated to create a unified system enabling the generation of student employability insights.

Subsequently, we used a rapid burst of prototyping to translate strategic concepts into tangible artefacts, helping to generate organisational buy-in, insights from staff, and student feedback.

This collaborative effort has positioned QAHE to become a leader in digital product innovation, fostering a product mindset among key staff and supporting the development of a comprehensive proposition, and a vision for skills development and student employability.

Unthinkable’s work has created an environment where creativity can be discussed, tested and refined, and in particular between departments in QAHE. It’s bringing in elite product development expertise to elevate what we currently do and to innovate into new ways of working. Unthinkable have been great in clarifying how our strategy to provide employability-focused HE can be ‘productised’.

Martin Johnson, Director of Market Insights & Portfolio