Case study

Drop-in website widget for UK Government Apprenticeships Service

Chesterfield Borough Council

What we did

Overview

When the Government Apprenticeships service removed support for its embedded vacancy widget service at the start of April 2022 Chesterfield Borough Council spotted an opportunity to develop their own drop-in widget in order to continue to highlight apprenticeship vacancies available to local people through the Apprentice Town Initiative.

The challenge

Schools and other organisations in the education and training sector had relied on the government service previously, but this was no longer accessible. Chesterfield Borough Council came to Magnifica for help in designing an easy to use way to continue showing vacancies on partner websites through the Apprentice Town Initiative.

Our solution

The government service whilst no longer offering a display widget directly did continue to provide access to vacancy data via a publicly available API (application programming interface). Using this API we were able to design a solution that took the complexity out of accessing and displaying the data.

The drop-in website widget we designed offered a layer of technical abstraction that handled polling of the government API, storing of the vacancy data in an intermediary data store, and the rendering of the vacancies on any website.

The government API is polled once per hour checking for new or updated vacancies.

Flowchart showing "Our solution" interacting with "Gov API" and "Widget 1, 2, X" through arrows.
Technical overview of the Apprenticeships widget system.

Now with just 2 lines of code a fully customisable Apprenticeship widget could be dropped into any website.

Widget in action

Key to the success of the project was to ensure adding a widget to a website could be done easily and without any technical knowhow. This requirement was met with a simple approach that meant by adding just 2 lines of code to a website organisations could be up and running in just a few minutes.

Example of adding the widget code via the WordPress block editor.

How it looks

The 2 lines of code above is all that is required to load the widget below. Some settings for each widget allow the website owner to configure the accent colour for buttons etc, a central geolocation for the vacancies and a search radius.

Filters are added automatically to the widget based on the data collected from the Government API.

The Apprenticeship widget has provided a simple solution to a common problem. We are now able to provide this service to schools and other education organisations in the town which allows them to quickly display apprenticeship vacancies on their website. The best part is they can do this without having to write any code or make major changes to their website.

Magnifica were fast to respond with a robust solution that just works. We have been happy with the service that has been provided by Magnifica, who have delivered against our requirements, demonstrating technical skills and speedy delivery.

Emily Williams, Skills Delivery Manager at Chesterfield Borough Council