FM Global

Engineer Field School

Digital Product Experience & Architecture

Challenge

FM Global needed to improve knowledge retention among their field engineers while reducing training time from twelve months to ten.

Ideally, the solution would be personalized, include two-way communication between the learner and the administrator, and be mobile in order to be taken on location by cohorts during instruction while also serving as a digital tool in the field following completion of Engineer Field School.

Approach

With data from FM Global’s SMEs, project managers, and user surveys from field school graduates, clear instructional and business goals were developed leading to the creation of a large-scale, integrated, training and communication application.

"Art without engineering is dreaming. Engineering without art is calculating.”
— Steven Roberts

Serving as both in-class instruction and on-site demonstrations, the application allowed Mentors to speak individually to ‘MOETs’ through the personalized chat aspect of the application. A cohort-specific knowledge hub containing engineer news, resources, immersive demos, step-by-step video instruction, certifications, was added to aid the in-class and on-site experience of training. Instructional games where materials were to be cited and flagged were designed to increase learner retention to improve testing scores and ultimately reduce time length by two-weeks from certification failure, rescheduling, and retesting.

Value

Following dramatically improved instructional methods from a staged release of the Engineer Field School training application, widespread adoption was achieved.

Field engineer positions require a high level of mobility, with the designed searchable live news feeds, immediate mentor communication, gamified & live project scenarios, and instant access to a library of corporate insurance resources the EFS application is able to serve as both an in-class training tool and continued use as an on-site knowledge resource.

These enhanced mobile training methods from on-site demonstrations, increased communication between MOET and mentor made possible through the applications chat functionality allowed for a reduction in training time from twelve months down to the original goal of ten weeks.