June 2018: [Insert content here]

Content editor Olivia has been working with social specialist Jess Riches to plan our writing style, and how we structure our information. We know our users don’t have a lot of time, so we don’t want to make it harder on them with jargon they’ve never heard before, or formats that are hard to take in from a phone screen.    

With those important principles out of the way, it’s on to actually writing everything, and using it to help people reach their own work goals. Hopefully we’ll be able to start inviting the first early access users in to see it by the end of next month. (Sign up for early access here if you didn’t already!)   

Alice and Iban took WorkSmart on the road to show our ideas to young workers in Liverpool. It was great to see a really positive response to our content. They particularly liked ideas around finding out your rights at work, and how you can be your most confident self. It’s helping us prioritise the learning packages we develop first.   

We’ve decided we're going to commit to doing much more of our user testing outside of London. With most of our team London-based, that’ll be harder for us to arrange. But we need to get out there and get wider perspectives if we want WorkSmart to work well for everyone.   

We also went to Parliament, to talk with a group of MPs on why we think it’s so important to help young workers deal with their problems at work. Today’s under 30s get a worse deal on pay than previous generations - They now earn 21.9% less than over 30s, compared to 14.5% less 20 years ago – the gap is growing. Plus they typically have less job security, and in many cases worse career prospects longer term. That’s all stuff we hope we’ll be able to help them tackle.   

And even more exciting, the app is starting to take shape for iOS and Android, thanks to Pedro. Don’t go looking for it in the stores just yet, but it’s great to have something to start playing with – even if most of that playing is going to be bug-fixing for now!