Reducing learner admin: Building a mobile-first learner platform for The Coders Guild
Making off-the-job logging as easy as taking a photo, without losing the audit trail.
The Problem
The Coders Guild is an apprenticeship training provider with a mission to make it as smooth as possible for learners to complete their apprenticeship, with less admin and more support, while keeping the audit trail the DfE requires.
Every apprentice has to evidence their off-the-job (OTJ) training hours and progress against the knowledge, skills and behaviours (KSBs) of their standard. That record lived in individual learner spreadsheets. For learners, logging was a chore. For coaches and admins, the spreadsheets were a maintenance headache and bottleneck.
The Coders Guild came to us at short notice, with a fixed budget, funding goals to hit and a set of requirements already written. Phase 1 had one clear priority: make OTJ logging as simple as possible, without losing the audit trail.
Summary
- Stakeholder Interviews
- Proto-personas
- Systems Mapping
- Product Roadmapping
- Backlog Prioritisation
- Data Modelling
- Laravel Development
The Process
Phase 1 ran for around 14 weeks, from the first requirements session to testing, with technical oversight from us throughout.
We conducted stakeholder interviews to validate the written requirements against how the team actually worked.
For speed, we built light-touch proto-personas for admins, coaches and learners, based on their roles and those interviews. They gave us enough to design for real behaviour without a lengthy research phase.
Next we mapped the systems The Coders Guild relied on day to day, then drew clear boundaries: what the new platform would own now, what would stay in tools like Monday.com for the time being, and what future phases would pick up. A product roadmap and a prioritised backlog ensured the rest was mapped out for later phases.
Underneath it all was the data model, planned before any development. That's where the details that spreadsheets quietly absorb came to the surface, like the difference between a learner and their enrolment. Catching them early gave the platform the right foundations for what followed.
- Requirements tested against real ways of working
- Proto-personas for admins, coaches and learners
- A systems map with clear Phase 1 boundaries
- A data model ready for future phases
The Solution
Phase 1 delivered a working, mobile-friendly platform that took the core workflows (OTJ logging, approvals and KSB tracking) off the spreadsheets.
Logging is now as simple as taking a photo. Learners snap their OTJ evidence on their phone, tag it with the relevant KSBs and submit it, with gentle reminders when a log is due. Every submission is reviewed and recorded, so the audit trail builds itself.
- Learners see their apprenticeship progress in a mobile dashboard, submit weekly OTJ logs with clear upcoming and overdue states, view upcoming sessions from their learning plan and track their KSB progress.
- Coaches see their assigned learners, review and give feedback on OTJ logs, and record each learner's progress against their KSBs.
- Admins get a full overview of every learner: KSBs, projects, OTJ logs, logged versus expected hours and RAG status. They onboard learners and coaches, and add new apprenticeship standards from a central government feed.
Built with Laravel and Filament, the platform works as a Progressive Web App (PWA), so learners can add it to their phone's home screen without going through an app store.
It was delivered on time, on budget and met its funding goal with the foundations in place for future phases.