Airbus Mobile is an assembly site for Airbus’ Commercial Airplanes division, located in Mobile, Alabama, United States. The site is the major assembly and delivery site for Airbus commercial aircraft in the United States.

In partnership with the Alabama Aviation Training Centre (AATC); the Programme serves as the Airbus training facility as well as other aviation-specific training needs. The Immersive Learning Studio was selected based on similar work that we have completed for Lufthansa Technik.

The Airbus Training Facility was undergoing a specific programme of activity which involved the learning and development of its employees, centred around new processes and techniques. The coaching that was being delivered was instructor-led and was to take place during a given period.

The senior management teams wanted to investigate ways in which these techniques could be captured, digitised and made available, not only to the personnel involved in the initial implementation stages but to everyone at the Airbus Final Assembly Line site.

Further to this, any supplier who provided services to the Airbus Training Facility had an obligation to meet set criteria for localised suppliers. This meant, at the very least, all providers needed to have U.S. representation and to produce content that met the needs of their workforce.

Our training partner, Project7 Consultancy, was engaged to lead the programme in Alabama, USA. We worked closely with the delivery team in providing an agile approach to the design of all training materials and deliver this overall content as microlearning topics, wrapped up in our Integrated Agile Learning Platform.

The first phase of our development was planning and preparation. This stage was completed predominantly via remote conferencing and shared cloud drives. We set up our workflows and introduced the teams to our collaborative project planning process. This is typical of the work process that we employ when undertaking any rapid development of agile learning content or learning management system.

We were working with a base-content style derived from traditional PowerPoint slide decks. Learning objectives were also put into place for each of the current learning topics. This information was then used to trigger some ideas that would help innovate the new design and determine the learning objectives for each of the units. This was a 2-3 week iterative design process which concluded with an agreed overall look and feel.  Once we had sign-off and approval, we quickly moved to the next stage of development. We worked off the agreed brand style guide and learning objectives to create interactive presenter-guided, and other types of learning materials.

The main content was via live talent. We also used interactivity and design elements to reinforce key points. Our Client specified that any talent should be of North American accent. We cast a North American presenter whom we used to present the information. This was recorded in the U.S. behind green screens and then edited in our Liverpool Studios.

Our development also follows the iterative process. This involved the teams looping through the development, implementation and evaluation stages. The key stages included a finalised design proof, Alpha and Beta, before finally rolling out.

All of the content was created in a modular format and uploaded to our agile learning platform. Users were provided with access and began to use the training materials in our agile training environment.  The Alpha and Beta testing included delegates from all levels at the Airbus Final Assembly Line.  Following further iterations, each module was finalised and the content was added to our cloud-based Integrated Agile Learning Platform.

The Airbus Training Facility now has a digital microlearning platform (click here to view the platform) which is relevant to the Final Assembly Line team and supports the instructor-led programme. The new content and learning platform provides learners with the opportunity to forge their own learning pathways. This agility means that anyone can now be ‘walked-through’ the exact processes that were undertaken during the initiative and can be upskilled in any number of operating systems and tools related to their work.

The final project, which included the design of 10 x 30-40 minute modules plus the integrated agile learning platform, was completed in less than 6 months. Airbus and its partners are extremely happy with the end result and are now looking to extend the use to cover additional areas which have yet to be digitised and made available in this way.