Skills Development Scotland Internship Scheme
Project starting Autumn 2022
Application Deadline Extended: Friday 26th August 2022 at 12pm
Skills Development Scotland (SDS) is Scotland’s national skills body. SDS contributes to Scotland’s sustainable economic growth by supporting people and businesses to develop and apply their skills, and works with partners to provide services that deliver the very best outcomes for Scotland’s people, businesses and the economy.
The SDS Evaluation and Research team provides high quality, robust evidence and insight to support SDS in meeting its goals in relation to equality, diversity and inclusion. This includes research on the careers, service; apprenticeships programmes; support for employers; and SDS as an organisation. The aim of this internship is to support the E&R team to carry out in-depth equality analysis across a range of our projects with young people.
This placement will provide:
- An opportunity to work in a fast paced, innovative working environment;
- The potential to influence and guide future practice within a national public sector organisation;
- Practical, hands-on experience of working with stakeholders in a public sector environment.
Full details of the three internship opportunities can be found below.
Watch this short video to find out more about what SDS does
Five reasons to do an Internship with Skills Development Scotland
Case Study: Cara's Internship at Skills Development Scotland
Read about Cara's internship with SDS...
"The internship helped me gain a great deal of confidence in myself and my abilities as a researcher.”
Case Study: Evaluation of Skills Development Scotland’s Apprenticeship Wellbeing Survey
Read about Rebecca's internship with SDS...
"I would definitely recommend undertaking an internship at SDS during your PhD, as it’s an amazing opportunity to learn new skills in a supportive and encouraging environment.”
Current opportunities
Barriers to accessing digital services across equality groups
The aim of this internship will be help SDS understand the barriers facing our customers across different equality groups in accessing our digital services. In particular, to identify those equality groups who may not engage, or have difficulty accessing, SDS services online. The main focus will be on My World of Work (https://www.myworldofwork.co.uk) and App.Scot (www.apprenticeships.scot).
Supporting the equality evidence base for Skills Development Scotland.
The main focus of this internship will be to support the updating of SDS Equality Evidence Review (EER). The EER provides a review of research evidence in relation to education and employment across equality groups. In recent years this has been expanded to include care experience, poverty, criminal justice, and veterans. The EER provides an important role in SDS in supporting the SDS Equality Mainstreaming Report, SDS Equality Outcomes, SDS Equality Impact Assessments and providing colleagues with an up-to-date source of evidence on equality issues to support their work.
Creating reproducible research visualisations via R to influence policy decisions on career pathways for young people.
The aim of this internship is to support the E&R team with this shift to using R, primarily by helping to create the outputs and visualisations for the Young People’s Career Ambitions (YPCA), Young People in Scotland survey (with Ipsos MORI), Pupil’s Voice, and Apprenticeship outcomes projects. These research projects are focussed on the career pathways of young people and include some evaluative elements which feed into service development, policy making and continuous improvement.
