Lightbulb
A co-designed apprenticeship discovery platform — built by apprentices, for apprentices, and presented to BBC directors and the National Apprenticeship Service.
Overview
Lightbulb started with a simple frustration: finding and understanding apprenticeships is harder than it should be. When I started my BBC degree apprenticeship in 2019, the discovery experience was scattered, uninspiring, and overwhelmingly text-heavy. Existing platforms like gov.uk felt more like bureaucratic portals than anything that could communicate the genuine excitement of starting a career.
The idea began with a coursemate's podcast exploring apprenticeship stories, and my own interest in web development. Together, we set out to build something better — an all-in-one platform where young people could genuinely explore apprenticeship opportunities the same way they'd browse Airbnb or Patreon: visually, intuitively, and with personality.
Co-designed with apprentices
What made Lightbulb distinctive wasn't the technology — it was the process. The platform was co-designed from the ground up with fellow BBC apprentices: people who had just navigated the apprenticeship hunt and had strong, lived opinions about what was missing.
Early ideation sessions surfaced ideas we wouldn't have reached alone: psychometric matching for people who didn't know what they wanted to do, application deadline notifications, integrated video interview tooling, calendar sync across the full application journey. The design kept returning to the same principle: apprentices deserve the same quality of digital experience as university applicants, and that experience should communicate the ambition and opportunity involved — not just list vacancies.
Presented to BBC and National Apprenticeship Service
The concept gained enough traction internally that we presented Lightbulb to recruiters and HR leadership within the BBC, as well as representatives from the National Apprenticeship Service. The feedback was genuinely encouraging and reinforced the core premise: the gap in quality between apprenticeship discovery and university discovery is real, and addressable through better design.
Technical implementation
The platform was built on a Next.js + JAMstack architecture, with Firebase handling data storage and Algolia powering fast, faceted search — allowing users to filter apprenticeships by field, location, level, and employer. Algolia's integration with Firestore enabled near-instant results and a map-based results view, making the geographical dimension of apprenticeship hunting genuinely useful.
This project was one of my first substantial Next.js builds and the point at which SSG, SSR, and dynamic routing shifted from concepts I'd read about to tools I understood through use.
Reflection
Lightbulb sits on hold — the ambition outgrew what two people could build alongside full-time apprenticeships. But it remains one of the projects I'm most proud of in terms of the problem it addressed and the rigour of the process behind it. The co-design approach, the stakeholder presentations, and the user-centred framing all predate my formal HCI training — in hindsight, it was an early instinct toward exactly the kind of work I've since pursued deliberately.
A more detailed writeup of Lightbulb from 2021 is available here.