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Ahead of the Middle East Rail Show taking place in Abu Dhabi later this month, we caught up with Kirt Barooah to discuss his thoughts around what’s needed in the Middle East to help the rail companies deliver an integrated next generation network.

AssessTech are excited to announce that we will be joining the cohort of companies exhibiting in the British Pavilion at Middle East Rail taking place on 17th and 18th May in Abu Dhabi.

This minor release is focused around improved navigation and tools for admins. There are also some additions to the Licensing module.

Safety on the Railway is a key priority for the whole sector from industry bodies such as the Rail Industry Association (RIA) through to Network Rail and SMEs such as AssessTech. We were invited to join this panel organised by Rail Technology Magazine.

Drivers who are new to the role and suffered an adverse event or those drivers with greater experience who have had several incidents benefit from focused training to help them understand all the available intelligence necessary to drive safely.

Reducing incidents and improving safety on the railway is a key driver for all passenger and freight railway operators. A reduction in incidents is strongly correlated to improvements in skills, competence, and confidence.

AssessTech will be attending the AusRail PLUS conference being held in Sydney from 28th February to 2nd March 2022.

We are delighted to announce that Leanne Hammond moves internally to take on the role of Head of L&D.

Rob Green joins us as Head of Operations managing our customer support team, overseeing day-to-day operations, support and customer issues.

Pip Stone from Eurostar speaks ahead of the User Forum on how they are using ACMS and AssessBook to manage competence within their engineering teams.

This year’s user forum will be a hybrid event taking place at The Woburn House Conference Centre in London. Register your place now.

Skills shortages amongst train drivers in Australia and New Zealand is a huge problem.

There’s always a need for individuals on the railway to receive training and support to help them deliver learning to groups or individuals.

The AssessTech User Forum returns this year on Thursday 18th November as a hybrid event taking place in the Woburn Conference Centre, London.
Registration is now open!

New freight train drivers in Australia face multiple challenges during their training. There is a huge difference between driving passenger v’s freight trains.

Learning and Development Consultant Gary Howitt has recently been awarded a Level 4 Diploma in L&D through City and Guilds.

A recent case study has been published by our LMS partner, Totara Learn exploring the benefits of their technology as part of the AssessTech product suite, for Heathrow Rail.

The Internal Quality Assurance Award (IQA) is aimed at individuals within an organisation who are responsible for planning managing and/or verifying assessors.

Recent improvements have been made to ACMS to boost data integrity, enhanced assessment module and better user experience.

The customer operations team at AssessTech has changed over the last few months, so we wanted to introduce you to our new colleagues.

Wed, Apr 7, 2021 5:00pm AEST – 8:00am UK time.
Rail Training and Operational Consultant Graham Force and Competence Management and Incident Investigation expert Gabriel Stroud have been invited by the Institute of Railway Operators (IRO) to host a webinar on 7th April.

We are delighted to announce that Gary Howitt, one of our learning and development experts is now a qualified internal auditor for management systems and can assess how organisations manage their electronic data security and processes.

We are delighted to announce that we have recently become a Totara Platinum Alliance Partner, making our online learning management solution, AssessBook, even better!

In the assessing world, the impact of non-technical skills (NTS) can be exposed when exploring safety improvements and reducing incidents. These NTS include an individual’s abilities to carry out a task, personality, interpersonal skills and motivations, which all have a strong correlation to their technical skills.

Hannah Washer takes on the role of Account Manager for UK and EuropeAs we enter 2021, we are delighted to announce that Hannah Washer has been promoted to the role of Sales and Account Manager for UK and Europe.   Hannah will work alongside Sally Brinkley to service...

2020….well what can we say. Who would have predicted that we were entering a year of economic turmoil with one of the worst pandemic’s the world has ever seen.

Even with all the challenges that we faced in 2020, we have had a very busy year.

MTR Elizabeth Line is a brand new overground and underground railway that will connect London City, Canary Wharf, the West End and Heathrow Airport to commuter areas east and west of London. They recently appointed AssessTech as a new competence management provider to help them create an exemplary model of their business, within learning and development.

SWR had been using a competitor platform to manage their competence for a number of years and decided to move to AssessTech’s ACMS solution as it offered more options that met all their business requirements.

Freight, passenger and light rail operators across Australia and NZ have yet to be introduced to the benefits of electronic competence management and the transformation it can make to systems, processes and the overall assessment of staff.

In a previous blog we’ve explored Developmental Competence Management, this is now more important than ever.

On March 23rd 2020 the UK changed. As the Coronavirus pandemic was taking hold, businesses were at a standstill wondering what the future would look like for them.

Our new Knowledge Base is live!

We carried out some research recently as we were curious about how much of the UK rail network we support through our training and technology solutions. We are delighted to report that we currently work with 85% of the UK’s rail network.

Sally Brinkley was very pleased to be asked to speak at the latest accessplanit Webinar.
With this brave new world of social distancing, at AssessTech we have had to face up to some interesting challenges to move all of our training online. Some of this was impossible, or so we were told…

With passenger numbers estimated to drop by 70% during times of social distancing there’s huge pressure being put on the UK rail industry to keep running. We are experiencing less trains and it’s assumed that this would make the railway safer. However, this might not be the case…

At AssessTech, we’re always looking for innovative ways to keep our customers businesses operating efficiently and safely and with the COVID19 pandemic, we now more than ever need to think differently.

AssessBook integrates with accessplanit’s software to create a smooth, automated competence record.

CEO at AssessTech Gabriel Stroud recently visited Los Angeles to attend Smart Transit, an event hosted in Los Angeles looking at how digitalization and technology is revolutionizing transit in the US, from enhanced analytics technologies to real-time passenger information systems. Rail will become the next big area of infrastructure investment for the US.

This year’s User Forum provided an excellent overview of the enhancements planned and delivered for ACMS, AssessBook and AssessTube over the last year as well as focusing on the new system features, Forms and the Check Module.

2019 User Forum focuses on new features, new themes and new platforms.

Our User Forums provide competence management professionals, across heavy and light rail, an opportunity to get together to find out about developments in AssessTech’s range of products, give feedback on their experiences, discuss industry challenges and share best practice. 

AssessTech explained why developmental competence management is crucial for light rail at this year’s UK Light Rail Conference.

As the industry’s leading annual congress and exhibition, the UK Light Rail Conference taking place in Manchester on 23 and 24 July brings together over 250 tramway, light rail and metro professionals. AssessTech’s operations director Sally Brinkley is amongst the 55 speakers and panellists.

The recent EU Light Rail Conference which took part in Brussels on 16th and 17th May attracted decision makers and industry influencers from across the light rail and tramway systems industry and one of the key themes discussed this year was the role of technology in safety management. 

We are delighted to have been awarded the Best Railway Technology and Training Consultancy in the 2019 Transport Awards, organised by SME News. 

The third in our Behind the Scenes blogs introduces you to the learning and development team at AssessTech who have the role of ensuring that Assessors, IQAs, Instructors, Trainers and Candidates are all up-to-date in their training and competence requirements.

This is the second of our Behind the Scenes blogs and this month we introduce you to the developers who have the mammoth task of creating new pieces of software and new features to keep our customers happy, as well as fixing bugs and upgrading the software performance.

The recent migration of train operations staff from Heathrow Express (HEx) to GWR caused a few issues. However, by using AssessTech’s ACMS platform the transition of staff competence records was a smooth process, maintaining all existing data sets and systems intact.

ROUND-UP OF 2018 2018 has been a busy year for AssessTech. We’ve managed the electronic transfer of competence records from HEX to GWR to support employee migration, the adoption of competence management within light rail via Tram Operations Ltd, a stronger focus on...

Developmental Competence ManagementWhat is it? And why is it extremely important now that staff are working remotely? Developmental Competence Management is all about putting the candidate front and centre of the process, focussing on their needs and encouraging them...

Gabriel Stroud, a man well known as the team captain and weapon operator for his fighting robot ‘Tanshe’ on This is Fighting Robots, and Sabre Tooth on Robot Wars in the UK, is also the inspiration behind ACMS, AssessTech’s electronic competence management system…