RAS onboarding programme

I designed and produced three new online courses focusing on safety in heavy industry.

Outline: creating an onboarding system for rope access operatives

Company: Rope Access Solutions (RAS)

Duration: projected to last 6 months

Role:

  • Building courses using Articulate Storyline and Rise

  • Writing the copy for the lessons

  • Producing multimedia content

  • Liaising with subject matter experts (SMEs), producing multimedia

Project summary:

RAS provides rope access specialists to infrastructure projects which need work completed at height.

These operatives need hit the ground running on site and deal with a variety of tasks using range of specialist equipment.

As a rapidly growing company, RAS needs an efficient onboarding system for their operatives. My role is to build an onboarding process using a series of digital courses.

Note: RAS’s content is produced in house specifically for their operatives. All of the content here is made up of examples, stock images, and mock-ups designed specifically for the portfolio.

Laptop showing an image of a rope operative with the title 'RAS onboarding'

Project challenge: making technical topics tangible

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Range of tasks that can be complex (), physically demanding (constructing walls), or dangerous (removing trees using chainsaws while suspended on ropes).

Many of the operatives have strong technical skills but have not found academic forms of learning effective.

Solutions

1: Varied and tangible content

It is particularly important to keep the written content to a minimum. Where it is used, it is paired with images that

2: Inclusive writing

Detailed style guide

Use of Hemmingway Editor to evaluate language complexity.

Glossary for techincal terms and all acronyms.

3: Relatable learning

RAS undertook research on their current operatives and their backgrounds. They used this to create an imaginary operator who is at a similar stage of his career to the new starters and has a similar background to those currently working for RAS.

This character was used as the ‘voice’ of much of the content. An AI voice was generated to be used on videos and animations.

I scripted these sections to match a friendly, informal style that would be relatable to the operatives.

Cartoon of an operative in orange high vis clothing an a white helmet.

4:

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Next steps: accessibility

The most urgent areas I would like to develop to improve the accessibility of the courses are:

  • Caption all videos and provide transcripts

  • Adjust the colours used on the LMS (especially for links) to ones that meet at least the WCAG AA standard

  • Provide more of the written content in online pages instead of PDFs