How Belfast built a trusted skills ecosystem.

Belfast City Council invests heavily in employment academies, programmes that bridge the gap between people without prior qualifications or experience, and employers willing to give them a chance.

The team wanted a way for participants to leave each academy with tangible, portable recognition of the skills they’d developed: something they could show an employer, even when they didn’t have a traditional CV or a degree to point to.

Digital badging, and Navigatr as the platform behind it, was how they answered that question. But what happened next wasn’t part of the original plan.

Belfast came to Navigatr for one reason: credentials for participants. What they found over the first few months was a second, larger benefit they hadn’t anticipated, a way to manage entire programmes in real time. The data the team had always struggled to collect was now being generated as a natural by-product of issuing badges.

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What started as a credentialing tool became something more like operating infrastructure for the entire employability service.

Belfast now uses Navigatr to monitor delivery across every programme, every cohort and every delivery agent, live, in one place. The team can see at any point who’s progressing, who isn’t, which groups are being reached, and where to intervene. Quarterly reports that once took weeks of manual collation are now a glance at a dashboard.

Inclusive growth, monitored continuously

Everything Belfast delivers has to advance inclusive growth, which means tracking, in real time, whether the right groups of people are being reached. Gender, disability, area-based deprivation, community background and other equality data (in Northern Ireland, the Section 75 categories) are now embedded into the badge process itself, not collected separately at the end.

When the team spots an imbalance, say low participation from people with disabilities in a particular academy, they can act before the programme ends, not after.

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Contract management, transformed

Belfast manages its delivery agents through monthly contract management meetings. With live data, those meetings have shifted from reconciling spreadsheets to making decisions: who’s reaching the right people, who’s getting the right outcomes, and what needs to change for the next month.

Because the data is already there, in a form everyone can see, the act of “reporting” has largely disappeared. The same information serves the operational team, the council’s committees, external funders, and increasingly the Northern Ireland Department for Communities.

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One of the operational benefits Belfast didn’t expect: badges have become evidence for releasing payments to third-party training providers. Where Belfast previously needed weeks or months of manual verification before contractor payments could be released, the badge data now provides the audit trail in real time.

Belfast still does periodic in-person audits, but the day-to-day flow of money to providers no longer has to wait. For training providers, often small organisations that can’t afford long payment lags, this is the difference between continuing to deliver and not.

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Belfast had concerns at the start about whether the platform would work for participants with lower literacy levels, or those a long way from the labour market. Those concerns disappeared within the first cohort.

Participants began comparing progress with each other, motivating each other through the academy. For people further from work, who often need additional support to finish a programme, that peer momentum has been one of the unexpected drivers of completion.

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Council buyers worry, rightly, about technology costs. Belfast’s experience is that the operational efficiencies generated by Navigatr exceed the cost of the platform by at least 2x, and that’s before counting the strategic value of being able to act in real time.

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2x+

Efficiencies generated relative to platform cost

Months → Days

Reduction in payment release time to providers

Real-time decisions

Rather than the multi-month manual reporting cycle that came before

Belfast’s use of Navigatr has now expanded well beyond one council. The team has worked with the Northern Ireland Department for Communities and ten other councils to pilot a shared survey and reporting infrastructure through the Labour Market Partnerships, meaning that increasingly, reporting across the region happens through one connected system.

Sectoral body endorsement

The next horizon is getting sectoral bodies, Logistics UK, the Northern Ireland Social Care Council, the National House Building Council and others, to recognise specific Navigatr pathways as verified routes into a sector. That changes what a digital badge means: not just “this person has a skill,” but “this person is sector-ready, endorsed by the people who employ in that sector.”

Employers dropping unnecessary qualification barriers

Employers in tight labour markets currently require any degree, even one unrelated to the role. Belfast’s longer-term goal is to demonstrate that a verified Belfast pathway is a better predictor of capability. That opens up a much wider pool of candidates, and a much fairer route into work.

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Asked what they’d tell another council or combined authority considering this kind of programme, Sinéad and Jamie are consistent: don’t think of it as a one-year project, and don’t try to roll out everything at once. Start with one academy or one provider, learn what works, then expand.

The technical bit is the easy bit

The platform itself, both Sinéad and Jamie say, was not the hard part of the project. The change management, getting delivery agents, providers and partner organisations comfortable with a new way of working, was where they invested most of their time.

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Badge School: a way in for the team

One of Jamie’s specific recommendations for places starting out: Badge School. It’s the practitioner training that Navigatr offers, designed for the people inside a council or partner organisation who’ll be running the day-to-day delivery.