They started by defining the question they were trying to answer: ‘What are the current and future skills the aviation industry needs, and how are they being taught and learned?’.

To answer this question, they needed to find out what:

• the future of the aviation industry might be
• challenges the industry currently faces
• skills the industry needs right now
• skills the industry will need in future
• the gaps are
• to do to fill those gaps
• challenges that might arise from the transition.

When the project kicked off, Connected Places Catapult sent the design team some recommended reading. This included critical analyses of the current system and existing strategic plans for the future. The team prioritised the documents to make sure they would read the most relevant things first.  

When the project kicked off, Connected Places Catapult sent the design team some recommended reading. This included critical analyses of the current system and existing strategic plans for the future. The team prioritised the documents to make sure they would read the most relevant things first.  

They set up their research framework on the virtual whiteboard Mural. It consisted of 3 tables:

• Government policies and strategy
• Local strategy, context and skills development
• Industry insight.

Each table had headings:

• Document link
• Document summary
• Skills
• Challenges
• Opportunities
• Key learnings

The team assigned 2 people to do the desk research alongside other tasks. Their framework let each person see at a glance what the other was doing. This stopped them picking up a source document the other had already started reading, preventing duplication of work.

They wrote each piece of information they found on a virtual sticky note  and put it in the relevant column of the right table.

To begin with they used colour to differentiate types of findings. But because they didn’t agree a colour code in advance, it became confusing, as different people used different colours to mean different things.

They soon abandoned this scheme. Instead they used colour to show whether a sticky note had been copied over to another board that they were using to do a thematic analysis of their findings.

It took 2 people 5 days on and off to gather all the information from 5 documents of around 80 pages each.

Gathering and processing information in this way:

• sped up the subsequent synthesis process of adding their desk research insights to insights from first-hand field research
• helped them ask better, more informed, questions in their first-hand research interviews