B2B Apprenticeship Onboarding

Building a greenfield concept with AI — compressing a 6-week onboarding window, reducing manual FTE reliance, and giving leadership a clickable prototype to align on scope and sequencing.

Overview

The challenge & the opportunity

BPP wanted to reduce operational friction and compress the 6-week onboarding window that relied on 70+ FTEs and heavy manual workarounds, recognising the process as ready for automation and agentic AI.

Heavy reliance on manual spreadsheet workarounds, driven by a lack of trust in existing systems. 51% of onboarding time was spent on hold across manual eligibility checks and data reconciliation. The solution also needed to scale across five client segments and reconcile inconsistent school and Salesforce data.

Service blueprint of BPP Apprenticeship Onboarding As-IS process showing current state flows, pain points, and system touchpoints for internal colleagues, clients and learners

Blueprint created to understand current process and identify pain points of internal colleagues, clients and learners.

Outcome

Results

The modelled onboarding window was halved from 6 weeks to ~3 weeks. Time on hold was projected to drop from 51% to ~15%, and manual booking work reduced from 26hrs to ~5hrs per week per CSE. Live cohort visibility was projected to cut client query volume by 60%.

Process

Discovery & alignment

I led the discovery and prioritisation phase for BPP's P&T Academic Life team, speaking with 50+ stakeholders across client-side and BPP-side roles to map how onboarding actually ran and where time was being lost.

Alignment across Apprenticeship Operations, Client Operations, Scheduling & Resources, and the product team was central to the project — painpoints needed to be reframed into testable hypotheses the whole group could get behind and sequence.

I worked with the teams to shape the solution space, then shipped an interactive to-be journey prototype built in Claude, giving leadership a real, clickable artefact to align on scope and sequencing.

Team of stakeholders gathered around a whiteboard mapping out the apprenticeship onboarding flow with sticky notes during a workshop session

Working with stakeholders in workshop to align teams, understand process and ideate around common pain points.

Solution

AI prototype

The deliverable was an interactive to-be journey prototype — a client-facing cohort dashboard giving employers live visibility of their apprentices' onboarding status, with the ability to manage the cohort and communicate with BPP directly. Built in Claude, the prototype gave leadership a real, clickable artefact to stress-test assumptions and align on delivery sequencing.

Apprenticeship Onboarding Portal bulk upload screen showing spreadsheet upload option for adding a whole cohort at once

Allowing bulk uploading for client not disrupt their current work flows with spreadsheets.

Client cohort dashboard showing apprentice onboarding status, next actions, and progress tracking

Client view of cohort for upcoming apprenticeships — employers can manage the cohort and communicate with BPP directly.

BPP colleague view of apprenticeship onboarding portal showing cohort allocation per team with status tracking and workforce management tools

Colleague view to see their allocation of cohort per team, with senior manager having access to workforce management tools to improve efficiency.

Learner application screen showing pre-filled details from employer, photo ID upload, and automated AI checks for identity, eligibility, levy funding and prior learning

Learner application where learner has to confirm details and upload ID and automated AI checks take place to reduce work load on colleagues, speeding up application process.

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