YPG Student Portal

YPG is on a mission to get young people into hospitality careers. Not just listing jobs, but building a structured pipeline from education through to employment, with reflective journals, placement tracking, and institutional oversight baked in. The challenge was that nothing like this existed off the shelf.

Three user groups with fundamentally different needs. Students need to discover placements, apply, and maintain reflective journals documenting their experience. Employers need to post opportunities, manage applications, and track placement progress. Colleges need administrative oversight across all of it — seeing which students are placed, monitoring journal submissions, and managing the relationship with employer partners. All of this needed to work on web and mobile, with a Royal Navy careers integration on the roadmap. And the App Store approval timeline made a native app impractical for the pilot.

A role-based platform where each user type gets a tailored dashboard with appropriate permissions and workflows. Shared recruitment data flows between all three sides. Students browse, apply, and journal. Employers post and manage. Colleges oversee and administrate.

A PWA implementation solved the mobile requirement without the App Store bottleneck — giving students a native-feeling experience they could install straight from the browser.

The architecture was designed to scale into additional partnerships, including the planned Royal Navy integration.