Award Nomination:
The Bristol Port Company have been working in partnership with Weston College to develop a range of innovative interactive resources addressing skills and safety requirements for new starters at The Bristol Port Company as part of a new online induction programme. The Bristol Port Company identified areas for improvement in their existing training offering for new staff, including issues with storing and analysing the effectiveness of paper-based assessments. This was also seen as an opportunity by both parties to explore how interactive digital approaches could be utilised to make learning content more effective and engaging, enhancing the onsite face to face training delivered by senior staff.
Weston College’s Digital Learning Team have worked closely with staff from The Bristol Port Company to produce bespoke resources which draw on The Bristol Port Company’s internal campaigns to emphasise the key messages that staff need to know to keep them safe while working across the port.
This is phase two of a project which began with a shorter gantry crane familiarisation programme, enabling staff and contractors to complete online safety modules, preparing them for work on site prior to their arrival. The interactive online induction collaboration will provide new members of staff with a unique way to learn about safe working at The Bristol Port Company while also learning about the company’s commitments to wellbeing and sustainability and will hopefully form the basis for a wider collaboration to cover more in-depth topics, using innovative and engaging learning techniques.
Additional Information:
The Bristol Port Company and Weston College have built a strong partnership over a number of years, including good collaborative links and a successful apprenticeship programme.
The decision to collaborate with Weston’s Digital Learning Team was borne out of the need to re-design the familiarisation training for the port’s gantry cranes addressing the joint challenge of ensuring all current staff and contractors received timely and effective familiarisation training, which could also be completed prior to contractors arriving to work on-site.
Another factor prompting the need for a new approach to training was the recognition that safety procedures on site were not always being followed consistently by all staff, leading to a risk of accidents occurring. Staff responsible for safety at the company felt that more needed to be done to reduce this risk and saw new training modules as part of the solution.
The new interactive familiarisation training aimed to address these challenges by providing high quality resources which can be completed online, and which complement the traditional face-to-face training. The learning and video resources developed can be completed on a web browser or mobile phone, and provide key safety information for staff and contractors, taking them through all of the up-to-date safety processes that should be considered when carrying out work on the gantry cranes and cementing their understanding with staggered testing.
Following the successful completion of this project, the two organisations have taken this training programme a stage further, developing a full online induction programme including a range of topics such as Health and Safety at The Bristol Port Company, Sustainability, and Cyber Security. The core concept was to provide new staff with a detailed and engaging overview of safety procedures at The Bristol Port Company in a format that allowed for completion data to be tracked and recorded automatically.
Senior staff at The Bristol Port Company have worked directly with the Digital Learning Team to provide relevant policies and procedures, including scripting the information presented within the resources, whilst the team at Weston College have used their expertise in instructional learning design and immersive video to create gamified resources based on the outcomes of design discussions between the two organisations. The resulting materials will be used by the training team at The Bristol Port Company to support and streamline the face-to-face delivery of training, ensuring that learners are able to develop their understanding of procedures that will help them gain key skills and keep everyone safe at work. The nature of the online learning materials also makes it easier to track when training was last completed, allowing for regular refresher training to be planned and delivered as required, and ensuring compliance with safety guidelines through the capture of completion data. Both companies have expressed interest in exploring further development opportunities in the future, including developing a full suite of training resources on a wide range of topics covering both safety and skills, as well as launching similar training packages at other locations.
We wanted the new induction to be both informative and engaging, stepping away from more traditional classroom training. Users can complete the training before arriving at the port at a time that suits them and save their progress along the way.
We used several formats including 360 imagery, games and video to ensure the training was modern and appealing and we matched the branding to that of The Bristol Port Company. The training also enables The Bristol Port Company to display its ethos and values to new recruits which will settle nerves associated with starting a new role at a large company.
Below are some links and screenshots of some of the activities used in the training.
Here is a link to our Severn Sirens activity. This part of the course allows users to learn about the emergency siren procedure and the testing they should expect to hear every month. The activity allows the users to activate the alarms and gives a clear indication of the difference between an emergency and all clear signal: Severn Sirens
Stuart Wallace, Chair PSS | Louse Pratten and Gareth Croft, Weston College | Ryan Brown, The Bristol Ports Company | Neil Dalus – TT Club, award sponsors.