Case Study: Leonardo Helicopters Training Academy

Leonardo Helicopters Training Academy in Yeovil, UK (LH TAUK) in 2019 had a requirement to move away from their previous Learning Content Management System (LCMS), IBM's Kenexa Premier LCMS. Leonardo Helicopters is responsible for the design, manufacture, maintenance, and training of some of the world’s most advanced military specification helicopters. Accordingly, security around their courseware has to comply with government regulations and international standards such as ITAR. Kenexa was a 100% on-premises deployment and this configuration needed to be maintained for obvious security reasons. We have since deployed multiple instances of Workbit Author across both commercial and secure/restricted on-premises servers at LH TAUK. Workbit Author is now being used to produce the full range of training materials (e.g. computer-based training, instructor-led training, manuals, technical publications, assessments, and more) for all of LH TAUK’s military helicopter training programmes.

As part of the specifications set out by LH TAUK, configuration control, version history and restore, content linking and reuse, question banks and assessments, publishing of regulatory compliance reports, and integration with LH TAUK's suite of project management and BI tools, were all required.

In addition, the platform was required by LH TAUK to facilitate adherence to EASA Part-66, Part-FCL, S1000D and the UK MoD's JSP-822: Defence Systems Approach to Training (DSAT) - amongst many other regulations - for the production, management, and delivery of multi-format courseware and assessments/examinations.

Workbit Author provided much of the baseline capability, delivering a 95% off-the-shelf solution. Initial platform capability enhancements were requested to ensure parity with Kenexa and have since been delivered. At the time of writing, we are on Phase 4 of the development of the platform, adding significant additional capabilities that exceed those of our competitors, such as AI/ML content and asset generation and VR enabled courseware.

Having used Kenexa for the past 15 or so years, LH TAUK had amassed a significant library of courseware, distributed over more than 20 instances of Kenexa. This included tens of thousands of lessons, with millions of assets, content objects, and data objects. This posed a problem in terms of migration as it’s not something that you would want to rebuild from scratch. In response to this, Workbit created a migration suite, which interfaced seamlessly with Kenexa, to map, extract, and transfer the courseware contained on any one instance of Kenexa directly to the more advanced Workbit Author platform. Once transferred the courses could be maintained and modified within Workbit Author, and the end-users (students and instructors) would notice no discernible difference between courseware published from Kenexa and courseware published from Workbit Author.