End of week 1 Digital placement for Carlisle College T Level Students
Over the last two days, the Digital team has hosted nine T Level students from Carlisle College, marking the end of their first week on placement with us. The students are studying Digital Support Services: with Cyber Security, and earlier in the week they spent time with colleagues across our Cyber and Information Security, and our Infrastructure teams, gaining first-hand experience of the operational side of council technology.
We originally planned to take three students on placement. After meeting the group and hearing that other employers in the area were unable to offer placements, we made the decision to offer placements to all nine. Supporting local talent and widening access to digital and cyber careers is important to us, and it felt right to step in where we could.
The last two days of the week were office based, using our Digital and ICT project room. Kate Hurr and I opened with an introduction to working in council Digital and ICT services, covering what makes public sector technology different and why it matters. Kate also hosted an Ask Me Anything session, with thoughtful questions from the students on cyber threats, the wider industry, and her experience as a woman leader in technology.
"You are part of a Digital team asked to review a live or proposed council digital service.
Your job is to think like users, staff, and attackers, and identify how the service might be mis‑used, abused, or fail—and how to fix it."
For their first two days with Digital, we wanted the students to get a feel what it is really like to work in a local government digital team. That meant focusing on human-centred service design with security built in from the start. Working in small teams, the students chose a council service area such as assisted waste collection and explored user needs, journey maps, pain points, data capture and security risks. They analysed this to produce evidence-based suggestions to improve user experience, service delivery and cyber security.
We also made space to discuss the benefits, limitations and security considerations of generative AI, and our Intelligent Automation team closed out Friday with a hands-on workshop, where the students learned how automation underpins council services and built simple automations themselves.
The level of engagement, curiosity and critical thinking across the two days was genuinely impressive, and we are proud to be playing a part in supporting the next generation of digital and cyber professionals.
Next week the students will have some site visits to see data security at scale and join some of our end user computing teams.
