How we use information gathered through this site

TECHSKILLS PRIVACY POLICY

This privacy policy is provided by TechSkills Organisation, a company registered in England with company number 07223753, whose registered address is 10 St. Bride Street, London, EC4A 4AD, and who is a data controller for the purposes of this privacy policy (“TechSkills” or “we” or “us“).

1. Introduction

From time to time, as part of running our business, we collect and use certain personal information about individuals with whom we interact in relation to the accreditation services that we provide (we refer to such individuals in this privacy policy as “you” or “your“). Under UK data protection law, we have certain legal responsibilities about how we collect, use and share your personal information. This policy explains our privacy practices and covers the following:

• The types of individuals whose personal information we collect
• What personal information about you we collect and use
• Sources of personal information
• How we use your personal information
• Who we share your personal information with
• How long we retain your personal information for
• Any transfers involving your personal information
• How we legally justify using your personal information
• Your legal rights in relation to your personal information
• Other relevant information, including how to contact us.

2. Whose personal information we collect

We collect and use personal information relating to the following types of individuals:

• Learners – individuals registered on Tech Industry Gold (TIG) accredited programmes at Higher Education Institutions, colleges, private training providers and employers delivering in-house training. For the purposes of this privacy policy, we refer to such organisations as “Learning Providers“.
• Educators – who are delivering education or training on TIG accredited programmes, in order to issue TIG Credentials attesting to this.
• Industry Professionals – who support TechSkills’ Tech Industry Gold activities, such as Employer Board members and judges of TIG student competitions.

3. What personal information about you we collect and use

Learners: Personal data we collect and use will generally consist of your name, email address and details of the TIG accredited programme you are undertaking or have successfully completed (name of programme along with specialism and / or completion date where relevant).

Educators: Personal data we collect and use will generally consist of your name, email address and details of the TIG accredited programme you are delivering.

Industry Professionals: Personal data we use will generally consist of your name and email address.

4. Sources of personal information

a) From your Learning Provider: for Learners and Educators, we usually receive your personal information from the relevant Learning Provider.

b) Directly from you: for Industry Professionals and occasionally for others, we may collect information directly, for instance if you register with us on our website or contact us by email.

5. How we use your personal information

a) Issuance of digital TIG Credentials. We process your personal information in order to offer the relevant TIG Credentials to you, in particular via the third party platform provided by an organisation called Accredible (https://accredible.com/) (“Accredible“). We will upload your personal information (name, email address and credential to be offered) onto Accredible’s software platform to issue your credential. When viewing your credential you can create an account directly with Accredible. This will require you to agree to the Accredible Terms of Service (https://www.accredible.com/legal/terms-of-service) and the Accredible Privacy Policy (https://www.accredible.com/legal/privacy-policy). You will then be able to log onto the Accredible platform and accept your TIG Credential).

b) Other communications. We may use your personal information to communicate with you (by email) about other services and offers which may be of interest to you. This may include an invitation to participate in the TIG community and gain access to information about employer supported events and networking opportunities. You can withdraw such consent and/or object to receiving any further direct emails from us at any time, following which we will cease sending such messages to you.

6. Parties with whom we share your personal information

We share your personal information with Accredible which is a third party provider of the Accredible credentialling platform. Accredible enables us to offer TIG Credentials to you as described above. Accredible has its own privacy policy, describing its collection and use of personal information https://www.accredible.com/legal/privacy-policy. This should be reviewed before creating an account with Accredible.

From time to time we may also share your personal information internally with techUK Ltd, who are our parent company. This would be to enable techUK to contact you with information about services and offers which may be of interest to you. You can withdraw such consent and/or object to receiving any emails from techUK at any time, following which techUK would cease sending such messages to you.

7. How long we retain your personal information for

We will only retain your personal data for as long as reasonably necessary to fulfil the purposes for which it was collected. To determine the appropriate retention period, we consider the amount, nature and sensitivity of the personal data; the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data; the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means; and the applicable legal, regulatory, tax, accounting or other requirements.

Details of retention periods for different uses of your personal data are set out below.

Issuance of TIG Credentials, For the duration of 14 months commencing after the date a TIG Credential has been offered to you via Accredible. Where more than one TIG Credential is issued to you, the 14 month period will commence from the date the last TIG Credential has been offered.

Other communications, We only hold such personal information for other communications purposes for as long as we have your consent to do so. We regularly refresh such consents to ensure that they remain valid, and they can be rescinded by you at any time.

8. Transfers of your personal information

We share your personal data with Accredible, which is incorporated in California. This may therefore involve transferring your data outside the UK to the United States of America (USA). We appreciate that any transfers of personal information from the UK to the USA will require certain steps to be undertaken, in order to ensure such transfers are compliant with UK data protection law. As such, Accredible conducts cross-border transfers of personal information via the Standard Contractual Clauses, which can be accessed on https://www.accredible.com/legal/dpa.

Please note that if you use an email service provider whose servers are based outside of the UK then related transfer of your personal information using that email service is outside of our control.

9. Legal grounds for processing your personal information.

Every use that we make of your information must meet a legal ground in the list set out by data protection law. The legal grounds which we rely on are as follows:

Issuing TIG Credentials: the legal ground which is relevant to us processing your personal information for the purpose of issuing TIG Credentials to you is “to achieve our legitimate business interests, in a situation where your rights are not jeopardised so as to override this”. Our legitimate business interests include:

1. operating our services efficiently and effectively; and
2. managing relationships with Learning Providers.

Other communications: where we do send other communications and information to you, we will only do so where we have obtained your specific consent to do so.

10. Your rights in relation to your personal information

If you have any questions in relation to our use of your personal information, you should first contact us using the contact details in paragraph 12 below. Under certain conditions, you may have the right to:

1. require us to provide you with further details on the use we make of your personal information;
2. require us to provide you with an electronic copy of your personal information that you or your Learning Provider/Institution have provided to us;
3. require us to update any inaccuracies in the personal information we hold;<
4. require us to transfer a copy of your personal information to another data controller, in a structured, machine readable and commonly used format;
5. require us to delete any personal information that we no longer have a lawful ground to use;
6. require us to restrict our use of your personal information;
7. withdraw your consent at any time, where the processing of your personal information is based on us receiving your consent;
8. object to receiving any further direct communications from us at any time, if we indicate that we use your personal information for such purposes;
9. complain to the Information Commissioner at any time (ico.org.uk); and<
10. object to our uses of your personal information which are based on the ‘legitimate interests’ legal ground, as indicated above. If any of our uses of your personal information based only on this legal ground is causing you undue harm, then we must cease using your personal information for that purpose.

Your exercise of these rights is subject to certain conditions and exemptions, for example to safeguard the public interest in investigating crimes, or protecting legal privilege. If you exercise any of these rights we will check your entitlement and respond in most cases within a month.

If you are not satisfied with our use of your personal information or our response to you, you can complain to the contact listed at paragraph 12 below.

11. Other Information

We will use reasonable endeavours to ensure that your personal information is accurate. In order to assist us with this, you should notify us of any changes to your personal information, by contacting us as set out below.

From time to time, we may make changes to our operations and the services we provide and consequently our privacy policy may change at any time in the future. We therefore encourage you to review it from time to time to stay informed of how we are using your personal information.

We are required to employ adequate technical and organisational security measures to protect your personal information from any loss, destruction, damage or unlawful disclosure. However, no transmission of personal information can ever be guaranteed as secure. Consequently, please note that we cannot guarantee the security of any personal information which you or your Learning Provider transfer to us or which we transfer to you or your Learning Provider.

We keep our privacy policy under regular review. This version was last updated on 18th October 2024.

12. Contact

If you have questions about this privacy policy, please contact us on info@techskills.org.