Reimagining Business Services Education: Human Centred Design at Scale with TAFE NSW

How might we reimagine one of Australia’s largest vocational business courses to better serve learners, teachers and industry? With nearly 5,000 annual enrolments across 72 campuses, the Certificate III in Business was experiencing shifting engagement and growing complexity. Teachers were under pressure, students were disengaging, and all of this was unfolding against the backdrop of a fast-changing business landscape shaped by generative AI and new workforce expectations. As part of TAFE NSW—a public provider serving over 400,000 learners—the solution needed more than surface-level tweaks; it demanded a bold, human-centred approach that could scale across classrooms, systems and campuses.

We went deep with 80+ learner, teacher, and industry interviews, 30+ hours of classroom immersion, and co-design with 60+ stakeholders. We identified pain points and turned insights into action. The redesign replaced 12 disjointed units with three workplace-style project clusters. It simplified content, embedded soft skills, added social learning, reduced repetition, and used tools like AI simulations to make learning more relevant. We focused on improving clarity, confidence and building a sense of classroom community. Ideas were tested with learners and teachers. The result is a course that flows better, and teaches more contemporary business skills.

This redesign is delivering measurable and lasting impact. Learner satisfaction rose from 68% to 85%, and confidence to complete the course jumped from 68% to 77%. Teachers are spending less time assessing and more time supporting. Materials and teaching cadence are now consistent across campuses, reducing duplication and lifting quality. Beyond the numbers, the impact is cultural. Human-centred design helped shift how education is delivered—more collaborative, more adaptive, and more human. The approach is now being used to redesign other priority courses across TAFE NSW, offering a scalable model for system-wide change. It’s design delivering real value, at scale.

This project shows what it looks like to bring service design into the heart of public education. It wasn’t just about what we built—it was how we built it. Human-centred design supported rapport building and empathy at every step, from understanding the real experience of learners and teachers to co-creating practical, scalable solutions together. - A best practice design approach: Discovery, Reflect, Co-design, Showcase - Interviews with learners, teachers and employers to deeply understand their needs, wants and worries. - Campus immersion to observe classrooms and uncover unspoken challenges - Empathy-building through detailed learner and teacher personas, mapped to diverse needs and barriers, and used as the springboard into ideation. - Co-design workshops with stakeholders to generate and prioritise ideas - Concept testing via focus groups to refine ideas early and often - Close collaboration between CX, teaching, product and development teams throughout - A model that kept the design team engaged through build and launch—not just handover at the end of the design stage. This approach has helped shift the culture of how courses are designed at TAFE NSW. It wasn’t a one-off. It has become a new way of working, a readily transferable blueprint for service design in education.