DWP Digital delivered its first virtual hackathon earlier this month. Hack2Work brought together more than 150 people from a wide range of backgrounds to develop digital solutions focused on helping people back into employment following the pandemic.
黑客马拉松是一项竞争性的活动, where multidisciplinary teams tackled real-world problems, developing ideas and bringing them to life by creating prototypes.
使用msteam平台进行为期三天的测试, the event began with keynote presentations from the events 资深股东Jacqui Leggetter, DWP Digital的整合主管, 以及高级劳动力市场运营主管, Nick Mellor from the National Employer Partnership Team. 保罗·弗朗西斯，环球信贷总监和DWP数字公司 CDIO西蒙·麦金农报道 他还通过视频向黑客喊话.
洞察现实生活中的就业问题
The issues were brought to life for participants in a number of ways. 在黑客马拉松之前, DWP的同事曾与一位前求职者共事, who set up his own business in film production after the pandemic left him without secure work in the TV industry. 结果是这样 video about Shay, a young person who was given a job placement through DWP’s Kickstart scheme. The video provided hackers with insights into the problems jobseekers are facing post-pandemic. Kickstart is aimed 16-24 year olds at risk of long term unemployment. It provides funding to employers to support the creation of new jobs.
‘Lightning talks’ from DWP colleagues set the policy and operational context covering a range of topics from jobcentre work coach challenges to DWP数字创新实验室 目标. A number of external speakers were also invited to present, 包括雇主TalkTalk, who covered the relationship between employers and the jobcentre and the 国家职业服务中心 who explained how they partner with DWP.
一旦场景设置好, hackers were invited to pitch their ideas around the problem statement and what they’d learned from the presentations. As a result, 11 teams were formed based on the pitch ideas. The teams comprised of DWP colleagues and digital specialists from across the tech sector including: GDS, 国民健康保险制度, CreatorSphere, Solidatus和赞助MongoDB, ScottLogic, 露天, 香港, 红帽和IBM. Hack2Work also had external participants including global attendees with one hacker saying: “I joined from the US. I enjoyed the event very much, waking up at 2:45am here was worth EVERY second.”
开发解决方案
Securing the support and sponsorship of six DWP suppliers, Hack2Work为参与者提供了一个在线平台, 访问软件和工程站点, 技术帮助以及娱乐和奖品.
Numerous impressive concepts and prototypes were presented on the final day, including the two winning teams’ ideas: a solution to bring jobseekers’ skills and experience together in real-time and a self-service app to enable jobseekers to match their skills and apply for local jobs in their own time, 而不是依赖于工作教练.
卡拉姆反对大官, 计算机科学专业的学生, who was part of one of the winning teams said: “I really enjoyed watching our team's idea go from words to a full design and prototype with mocked functionality in such a short time.”
这个想法是“RouteToWork”。, a tool that ties together functionality from various 政府ernment services, 比如 国家职业服务中心 访问的数据 国家统计局 APIs, to match jobseekers to the opportunities that are relevant and local to them.
卡拉姆补充道:“我也学到了 MongoDB的Atlas和Realm和used 红色的帽子来部署和托管我们的应用程序. 我们建立的网站如下 政府数码服务 设计和WCAG2.1无障碍标准, 测试与斧头辅助工具, to ensure its usability and has a user interface that's familiar to our target demographic.”
' RouteToWork '是使用 政府.uk 原型设计工具. Nunjucks was used as a template and it was written in JavaScript and HTML, with an Express.Js服务器运行整个程序.
Reflecting on the ideas that were created over the three days, Jacqui Leggetter said: “I was blown away by the quality of the entries. Everyone was working remotely alongside people they’d never met (even virtually) until the first day of the hack, and yet they still came up with incredible ideas and developed them to a really impressive standard. The amount of working code we’ve seen is unprecedented for a hack event. It was difficult to choose a winner but the amount of thought that had gone into both the front and back end made the two joint winning teams stand out.”
CDIO西蒙·麦金农报道 said he was "amazed by what had been achieved in such a short time.” He also spoke about how impressed he was that every team had created working code.
DWP Digital一直在寻找新的人才. 欲了解更多就业机会，请访问 DWP数字职业网站 or 订阅DWP数码通讯 keep to update with the latest roles, news and information.
