Reshape: A Skills Platform fora Region in Transition

Reshape is a skills and career-development platform built for Ireland's Midlands region, part of a Government of Ireland and EU-funded programme supporting communities affected by the shift away from carbon-intensive industry. It exists to help people in the region map their skills, close gaps, and find a real path to their next job, while giving employers and training providers the same regional picture from their side of the table.

I joined as the product designer, working from an early logo and a small set of brand colors, to design the platform from the ground up, for four very different people who all needed to use the same system.

Most platforms are hard enough to design for one audience. Reshape needed to work for four, at once, inside the same product: a person figuring out what skills they have and what to do next, an employer trying to see gaps across their team, a training provider trying to plan courses around real regional demand, and program staff overseeing all of it.

Each of those people needed something different from the same data. Get the balance wrong, and you end up with a platform that technically serves everyone but genuinely helps no one.

Instead of designing four separate products that happened to share a login, I designed one shared way of representing a skill, a structural language used consistently everywhere, just weighted differently depending on who's looking at it. Employers see it aggregated across their team as gaps and hiring matches. Training providers see it again as regional demand, to help plan what to actually offer next.

For the person at the center of it, that shared language becomes a full skill profile: a nested taxonomy of hard skills, soft skills, knowledge and language, each broken down by category and completion, alongside an interactive skill graph that shows how everything connects, not just a list, but a map of where someone's strengths cluster and where the gaps sit.

From there, a guided pathway wizard turns that profile into a plan: pick a goal, see the skills it needs, get a sequenced set of courses to close the distance, and track progress against it over time. The same experience holds up on mobile, not as a stripped-down companion view, but as the same system.

The system also closes its own loop: when someone's missing a skill and there's genuinely no course available to teach it, that gap doesn't just disappear, it gets logged and surfaced to training providers as a signal for what to build next. The platform doesn't just point people at existing courses; it helps shape which new ones get created.

An independent economic impact assessment by Indecon Economic Consultants, commissioned separately from the ReSHAPE team, which matters for credibility, confirmed the platform is delivering real, measurable regional impact.