Functional Skills UK

My Role

I joined Functional Skills UK, an adult-education provider, through a Knowledge Transfer Partnership with Edinburgh Napier University, as the company’s only developer. I’m fully responsible for its technology: gathering requirements with staff, tutors and leadership, then designing, building, deploying and running the result in production.

I designed and built Flow, the platform that now runs the provider’s day-to-day work: enrolment, assessments, online courses, exam booking and reporting, all in one system with one record per learner. It replaced a set of separate tools, spreadsheets and a third-party learning platform that charged for every learner, which alone saves the company around £30k a year.

Flow is built to be secure and to scale. Every action is checked against the user’s role and logged, each training provider’s data is kept separate by the database itself, and the platform runs in Docker on AWS with automatic backups, error monitoring and tested releases through CI/CD. It also connects to the systems around it, from the company website to Microsoft sign-in and live reporting dashboards.

I also rebuilt the company’s public website, functionalskillsuk.co.uk, in Next.js and Django. Learners can now pay for courses online through Stripe and are booked into Flow automatically, which has brought in £25k in course sales.

The project was nominated for an Innovate UK KTP Award.