Over the last few months, I have been working closely with Scottish Government colleagues in both the Rural Economy and Agriculture Teams, on ‘CivTech 5.0’; a project which has been supported with funding from a number of partners including Lantra, Scottish Government and Skills Development Scotland.

If you haven’t heard of this before, you are not alone. Before I attended my first CivTech event (CivTech 4.0) last March, at the invitation of Forestry and Land Scotland, I hadn’t either! Due to the logistical challenges faced by Forestry, I also mistakenly guessed that the ‘Civ’ bit was short for Civil Engineering.

Not so much. It is actually derived from ‘Civil Service’ and ‘Technology’ (please rest assured that I managed to guess the last bit) and is a Scottish Government Programme.

CivTech take problems that public sector organisations have and help to solve them in collaboration with innovative businesses. They use systems which are common in the private tech sector but rare in the public sector. These include open challenges and tech accelerators – approaches that have done so much to rapidly transform the world we live in.

When I attended CivTech 4.0, I knew exactly which project would be ideal for this kind of support. It was one that I had encountered through the Women in Agriculture Taskforce, but which we all struggled to solve by ourselves.

We know that challenges arising from geography and connectivity can make it hard to find appropriate mainstream learning opportunities. It’s even harder to uncover training that – whilst perhaps not certificated – nevertheless offers the content that you really need. This is particularly true when what you need is to observe and learn from the experience of others.

Accessibility and social factors can also present a barrier: individuals might lack confidence, feel isolated, or worry about being in a group of ‘all young people’ or ‘all men’. Or it can be that conventional ‘through the week’ courses do not fit with family and work responsibilities.

Accessibility is highlighted as a barrier within the Skills Action Plan for Rural Scotland and our CivTech challenge is just one of the ways that we’re working with partners to address skills issues in rural areas and implement the actions set out within the plan. 

Accreditation is of course essential for some training, particularly where there is a legislative requirement (for example, chainsaw training). However, for some other subjects, it may be an over-complicated way to get a quality mark. 

So, our question for CivTech was, “How can technology help develop a skill sharing system that encourages people to engage, and those with expertise to share their skills, in rural and remote locations?”

It wasn’t quite as simple as asking the question and waiting to get the answer back, because of course that wouldn’t have worked. What CivTech’s experience has taught them is that the challenge we think we face is often a lot more complicated than we know. Which makes sense, as none of us have an IT background (a nameless soul even describing it all as ‘witchcraft’ on a particularly challenging day…).

So how did it work?

Well, before our challenge was accepted as one that CivTech would support, they helped us re-examine it: to look at it from different angles, expand it, and then strip it back to this.

We were not the only organisation with a challenge to solve of course – there were ten in total – and you can see the ones that were selected here.

CivTech then opened the challenge to a range of tech companies through Public Contracts Scotland and helped us to score and shortlist the nine proposals. They then helped us to narrow the list down further, until we selected three companies that we would work with through an ‘Exploration Stage’. This lasted two weeks and boy was it intense! The three companies were amazing, asking different questions (of us and our stakeholders, thanks again to everyone who spoke to them!) and creating different possible solutions to our challenge.

The teams were lovely to work with. There was a quiet period at the end of this stage, after we had agreed upon which company had submitted the best overall solution, and we felt quite bereft of the regular contact with them all! It’s always energising to work with others towards a common goal when everyone really ‘gets’ the challenge. And they all totally got it. 

Myself and the challenge team are really looking forward to the next stage of development, starting in November.  Then, all being well, launch week is the first week in February! You can tell why it’s rather dauntingly called ‘the accelerator’….

If you have any questions about the above, or you would like to be more involved in shaping and testing this new product please don’t hesitate to get in touch! Call 01738 310164 or email me.