Gabriel Stroud, CEO AssessTech, gives the Keynote Speech

Better integration inside ACMS

Recognising that better integration starts with making the various modules of ACMS work together seamlessly. Alice Barrett, Customer Operations Specialist from AssessTech, presented a series of measures aimed at addressing the often-levelled remark, “all the data is there, but there’s a lot of clicking about”.

• New Wizards. The imminent launch of the Leaving Wizard provides the ability to remove all the details of individuals leaving the organisation including their personnel record, team information, tasks etc.
• Additional wizards under consideration include the addition of CDP schedules to candidates, adding causes to investigations and taking a person off-track.
• A Messaging solution for Bulletin which would make bulletins available on the move without the need for candidates to have the aBulletin App and the ability for assessors and candidates to self-assess.

Better Integration with Learning Management

Hannah Washer, Project Manager at AssessTech, spoke about better integration for Learning Management and some of the items on the AssessBook roadmap.

• Integrating Schedules to link e-learning courses and training days to inform someone’s competence.
• Integrating Assessments from ACMS to AssessBook and vice-versa
• Better visualisation of learning data on ACMS through a more engaging candidate dashboard
• A new, cleaner look and feel for AssessBook as part of Totara V13 upgrade
• And finally Mobile Apps – MLearn from Mobile Learning is being considered as an extension to AssessBook.
  • • It provides an offline experience specifically for playing SCORM packages and resolves issues with lost work due to dodgy network connectivity.
    • It’s compatible with Totara V12+ and existing SCORM content

The Virtual Verifier

Gabriel Stroud, CEO of AssessTech, presented a concept for the future direction of ACMS, called ‘The Virtual Verifier’. As a business we understand the challenges facing businesses where automation could potentially offer significant solutions.

• Analysis is underway on the potential to develop a more pro-active approach aimed at reducing incidents and improving performance, with the eventual goal to be able to ‘solve incidents before they happen’.
• As individuals take more ownership of their own competence, processes could potentially become more automated. The aim of the ‘Virtual Verifier’ would be to map an individual involved in an incident to the technical and non-technical skills that have failed them.  This data can be used to build a model to review the all incident reports and assessments and identify individuals who are at higher risk of a similar incident; pinpointing training courses or other learning resources to consider in order to prevent this happening.
• Focus groups are being set up to further scope this exciting development.

We were really pleased to have two guest speakers from our customer base at this year’s User Forum. 

Paul Atherfold from Greater Anglia gave an overview of their Paperless Competence Files

Storage of paper-based files created significant issues for Greater Anglia (GA) due to size and security. GA wanted to remove all paper across all of their offices. They invested a significant amount of time and effort into tailoring the system for their own bespoke requirements by:

• Adding a new medical tab to record medical records.
• Use of the supporting documents tab for job descriptions, safety statements, etc.
• A new ‘Publication and Equipment’ tab set up in a similar way to the ‘Route and Traction’ tab.
• Compulsory mitigation technique tab to record any incident mitigation techniques that drivers were mandated to do post incident to help mitigate future incidents.
• A tab to record mandated incident mitigation techniques.
• Use of the aBulletin module to maintain a record of publications including driver policy – this particularly helped in their drive to go paperless.
• Use of the forms function to record drivers that are prescribed long term medication for file verification, closure of schedules or verifying a newly qualified driver.

Pip Stone from Eurostar described how they are using ACMS and AssessBook to manage competence within their engineering teams.

We were also joined in our exhibition area by three of our industry partners who showcased a range of interesting solutions.

• RSSB who support the rail industry to continually improve its safety performance.
• 3DVSL who develop simulation and training apps for the rail industry.
• AssessTech’s Training department
• Mobile Learn joined the exhibitors on a virtual basis, showcasing videos and images from their MLearn product.

RSSB Exhibition Stand

Gabriel Stroud said,

“It was fantastic to see so many of our customers and partners together in person.  As an industry I think we have all missed that personal interaction and the User Forum was a great opportunity to bring everyone back together again. It was great to find out what customers thought about our current developments and our future roadmap. We’ve come away with a very long list of things to do which will keep us busy for the foreseeable future.”