UNESCO - United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

04/30/2025 | News release | Distributed by Public on 05/01/2025 13:56

UNESCO learning city of Belfast, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

In Belfast, learning is cherished in all its forms and championed as a catalyst for personal, social, civic, and economic transformation.

Improving the quality of life for all
Learning for people of all ages is deeply embedded in the Belfast Agenda. It reflects the evolving priorities of community planning partners and the public.

Developed collaboratively with city partners, residents, and community organisations, the Belfast Agenda outlines a shared vision and long-term goals for Belfast's future, alongside immediate priorities for action over the next four years.

Its collaborative approach fosters innovation and creativity in delivering public services, addressing vital concerns such as health, education and lifelong learning, employment, and the environment, while striving to improve the quality of life for everyone in Belfast.

Creating employment routes for all
Belfast's community plan contains goals to sustain and create new employment routes.

Working across the community planning partnership, Belfast has initiatives in place to support learning and make the best use out of the city's assets and resources to achieve outcomes.

Michael Kane

Professional & business services sector leader at Belfast City Council

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Michael Kane, Professional & business services sector leader at Belfast City Council
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Our strategic document - the Belfast Agenda - has a central theme of inclusivity. Our ambition is to bring opportunities to residents of the city who at the moment feel like they haven't had the opportunity to access job opportunities. We try to broaden access in an inclusive way. Therefore, our target groups for our employability and skills interventions tend to be those that are broadly banded as economically inactive - about 300 000 in Northern Ireland. We have an ambition to bring as many of those into the labour market.
Employment Academies
The Belfast employment academies offer customised training to support individuals in finding jobs while assisting businesses with recruitment needs.

These academies are short to medium-term, intensive programmes designed for groups of people with shared interests.

Michael Kane

Professional & business services sector leader at Belfast City Council

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Michael Kane, Professional & business services sector leader at Belfast City Council
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The intervention that we're talking about today is our Technology Employment Academy. The academy identifies employers who have an ambition to grow by diversifying the people whom they employ. This can mean that they need to visit or revisit the entry level criteria that they use to recruit and select candidates. We work with employers who are prepared to critically look at these criteria and ask themselves how important higher-level qualifications are to the roles that they need people to undertake. By and large, people often conclude that qualifications are of less importance than the weight that is currently put on them. This on the demand side: we want to work with employers. On the supply side, we're looking for people from within the broadly economically inactive group, and we're looking for people who can demonstrate a strong desire and aptitude to work in the technology sector. We do this in several ways - through online aptitude assessments, interviews, and group work assessments. People then come onto the academy, which typically lasts 14-16 weeks. The content of the academy has been designed in collaboration with the sponsoring employers. It could have a particular focus, for example, software, cyber security, product management, or programming. As part of the academy, learners get work experience with sponsoring employers; they'll also get a strong immersion in employability skills to prepare them for the world of work, and we offer them job interviews with sponsoring employers come the end of the academy. We have strong into-employment rates. That's our ambition; they're called employment academies for that purpose, and we're running at very high levels of conversion. For those that don't obtain employment, we continue to work with them for a period of up to 6 months where we provide after care to get them to their desired destinations.
Fastrack into Information Technology
Fastrack into Information Technology (FIT) Ltd is the appointed training organisation for Belfast City Council's Technology Employment Academy.

FIT Ltd is an organization representing Ireland's technology sector, dedicated to expanding the country's tech talent pool.

Its mission is to ensure access to in-demand tech skills, driving quality employment while promoting inclusion and leveraging technology to create opportunities for everyone.

Katie Slevin

FIT programme manager

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Katie Slevin FIT programme manager
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FIT has been working since 1999 to enable those who are most marginalized and unemployed to acquire skills that will enable them to pursue a career. The academies fit well into the landscape of FIT overall. We are Dublin-based and work across the whole of Ireland. We have been delighted to be a delivery partner for Belfast City Council on the academies. From the onset, we engage with employers to understand employer needs and help develop a curriculum that we can deliver throughout the academy. Within the design of that, we look at what modules of technical training we would be delivering over the course of the training. Most academies have been around the 16-week timeframe; that's four months of full-time significant technical training. We are very much advocates of classroom training, where we have a teacher led training facility and students can access day-to-day, face-to-face learning, which is very important for the individuals that come on the academies. Many have not been in a learning environment for some time, and for others it's been a challenge for them, so we want to make it an enjoyable and safe environment, but also a valuable learning experience. During the training, students will not only receive technical training, but they will also receive employability support, helping them to develop skills that will help them move towards employment opportunities. We work with marketing their CVs, and job interview skills as well. For a lot of our students, interviews are a challenge for them, and something they are anxious about, so we help to prepare them for interviews.
Transforming lives
Through hands-on training and personalized support, participants develop the skills and confidence needed to enter the tech sector.

Eoghan McLaughlin, one of the Technology Employment Academy participants, joined the programme without any formal qualifications in technology and has already made great strides during the first few weeks.

Eoghan McLaughlin

Learner at the FIT employment academy

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Eoghan McLaughlin, Learner at the FIT employment academy
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Hello, my name is Eoghan, and I'm 35. I joined the FIT technical training academy in order to learn computer science and programming. I come from a background where I didn't have a professional qualification in IT or software development, so FIT offered an alternative pathway for me to get into the professional side of software development and IT. In addition to that, it also offered me the opportunity to develop my people skills, my emotional intelligence, and my ability to put myself out there in uncomfortable, challenging situations, and gave me the opportunity to improve myself, in both a technical capacity and a personal capacity.
Dedicated educators
Eoghan's learning experiences highlight the impact of the Belfast Technology Employment Academy in creating accessible pathways into the tech sector. But behind every successful learner is a dedicated educator.

The programme's instructors play a crucial role in guiding diverse learners, fostering both technical expertise and essential soft skills.

Tutor Joe makes a lasting impact on his students while rising to the challenge of teaching a highly diverse group.

Joe

Tutor

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Joe, Tutor
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What motivates me to teach and what brings me joy in this course is, in the last course we did, we got 85 to nearly 100% of people employed, and that was really rewarding to see. It's a lot of hard work at times because there are loads of different backgrounds and skill levels here, so keeping the ones that are more skilled engaged, and the ones that are just starting off from day one from zero, with no background, making sure they get the skills. You have to juggle between the two, and it's hard. For example, if there were two different sets of challenges, making one easier, giving students a simple challenge that gives them confidence. As Dean said, it's rewarding when you solve a problem; there are endorphins coming into your brain, so you want to get addicted to solving the puzzles. If you can do that with students and with these challenges, that's what programming is, it's solving a problem, so trying to get that and express that, is important.
Joe does much more than teach technology skills-he instils a passion for problem-solving in his learners.

Dean is one of them, having joined the Academy without any formal tech skills.

Dean

Learner

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Dean, Learner Belfast
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My name is Dean. I've been on the software development course for four weeks now. So far, we've completely SQL and we're in the midst of Python. Unlike others in the course, I don't come from a qualified background at all. I currently work retail at nights and do this during the day. I've always had an interest in IT, but never had a chance to engage with it. I learned about the FIT programme through the Belfast City Council; I went to a meeting with them about a year and a half ago, and at the time it wasn't for me, the course that I went for, and then it was Claire from FIT who reached out to me and said there's this one that might be good for you. I completed that course at the start of January - it was the fundamentals, the basics of HTML, CSS, etc., and then Katie and Claire thought this course would be good for me. And although it is tough to balance everything, I'm enjoying it, I'm learning, and I'm actually genuinely having a lot of fun while I'm doing it as well. I can't speak enough about Joe… One of the reasons why I didn't enjoy the usual qualifications was people just showed you how to do it and let you go away; Joe on the other hand is good at showing you how to do things, and then going, 'Try this problem,' and giving you hints at times, but not giving it away, so you have to work for the answer. He doesn't let you just copy and paste it, which is really good as well.
Building a brighter future through lifelong learning
The Belfast Employment Academies, like this one, empower learners through upskilling, enabling them to build better lives while contributing to social and economic development. They are just one impressive pillar of the UNESCO Learning City's initiatives.

Belfast exemplifies how a UNESCO Learning City can transform vision into action. By fostering collaboration, innovation, and inclusion, Belfast is addressing challenges and creating opportunities through lifelong learning.

About GNLC
The UNESCO Global Network of Learning Cities (GNLC) supports and improves the practice of lifelong learning in member cities by promoting policy dialogue and peer learning, documenting effective strategies and good practice, fostering partnerships, providing capacity development, and developing tools and instruments to design, implement and monitor learning cities strategies.
UNESCO - United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization published this content on April 30, 2025, and is solely responsible for the information contained herein. Distributed via Public Technologies (PUBT), unedited and unaltered, on May 01, 2025 at 19:56 UTC. If you believe the information included in the content is inaccurate or outdated and requires editing or removal, please contact us at support@pubt.io