Improving the customer journey for lifelong learning with the Irish Universities Association

The challenge:

Pickle Jar was approached to develop a seamless customer journey to support recruitment and ensure the long-term impact of the MicroCreds project, a 5-year initiative led by the Irish Universities Association in partnership with seven leading Irish universities.

The project aims to provide flexible and accredited micro-credentials, short courses designed in consultation with enterprises. The IUA needed help to enhance customer decision-making and ensure effective collaboration across all partners to offer an optimal customer journey.

What we delivered:

Pickle Jar Communications undertook a comprehensive approach to understand and improve the customer journey for the IUA’s MicroCreds project. Our engagement comprised three main phases:

1. Discovery Phase: We reviewed existing insights, conducted interviews with stakeholders from IUA’s seven partner universities, and held a discovery workshop to map out the current customer journey. This phase aimed to understand the partners' perspectives on MicroCreds, their needs, priorities, and challenges including:

• What stakeholders thought, wanted, and needed

• The why, what, where, and when of (potential) customers’ lifelong learning journeys.

2. Research Phase: This phase involved a competitive review, conducting two online surveys (targeting existing participants and the general population), and interviewing individual learners and enterprise contacts. Our goal was to ascertain where people sought continuing education, their awareness of existing offerings, and their needs and desires, asking questions like:

• What do they value? 

• What do they engage with? 

• What is in their way? 

• What is blocking this specific journey?

3. Strategy delivery and implementation: To round off the project, a workshop, led by our Director of Experience Design, brought together IUA team members and representatives from partner universities to identify gaps between the existing and ideal customer journeys.

The workshop produced actionable short- and long-term recommendations to enhance the customer experience.

The project concluded with strategic recommendations focusing on four key areas: refining the customer journey, enhancing communications, and improving insights and evaluations, all underpinned by a need for increased collaboration within and between partner universities.

This holistic approach ensured a strategic roadmap for improving the MicroCreds project’s reach and efficacy.

“Increasing access and uptake of lifelong learning opportunities in Ireland is a key priority for the MicroCreds project.

Our work with Dana and the wider Pickle Jar team allowed us to build on previous user research we have carried out to really get inside the mind of current and potential learners to understand what motivates them to enrol in short, flexible courses and more importantly what are the barriers preventing them from committing to a course.

Through the interactive workshop that Dana delivered for us in Dublin our partner universities, who all have different approaches to student recruitment, were able to come together to breakdown the findings of the research project into short and long-term actions that they carry out in their university to support the collective goal of increasing uptake in lifelong learning in Ireland.”

~ David Corscadden, MicroCreds Communications Manager, Irish Universities Association