Skills-boosting courses developed by Lancaster University and partners are included on a free national platform, highlighted by the Prime Minister today.

The Skills Toolkit is an online resource giving access to free-of-charge, high-quality digital, numeracy and employability courses to help people build their skills, increase job prospects and progress in their career.

The resource is open to anyone, whether they are out of work or thinking about changing jobs, have just graduated or left full-time education and are starting their career - or if they are just keen to learn new skills.

To create the platform, the government was supported by some of the country’s leading educational experts and employers to produce resources to suit a range of interests and skill levels. All courses are flexible and online, ranging from a few weeks to a few hours, so learners can top up their skills at a time and place which suits them.

The newly-expanded toolkit includes six programmes from the - A Practical Guide to Essential Creative Technologies Collection – developed by Lancaster University, the Institute of Coding, FutureLearn and University Arts London (UAL) Creative Computing Institute. They are:

· Introduction to Creative AI

· Introduction to UX and Accessible Design

· Introduction to Conversational Interfaces

· Introduction to Indie Games

· Introduction to Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality

· Introduction to Physical Computing

Lancaster’s courses were developed by Professor Joe Finney, Dr Steven Houben, Dr Abe Karnik, Daniel Onah and Lorraine Underwood from the School of Computing and Communications in the Faculty of Science and Technology.

Professor Finney said: “Lancaster University is committed to providing high-quality digital education, and also supporting individuals and businesses as they recover from the impacts of COVID19 - both regionally and nationally. We are excited to see the Prime Minister’s announcement today and look forward to growing our activities in the future, as part of the Institute of Coding initiative.”

To learn more about The Skills Toolkit, visit https://theskillstoolkit.campaign.gov.uk/