Royal Bank of Scotland

Background

The Royal Bank of Scotland plc is a major retail and commercial bank in Scotland and now exists as one of the retail banking subsidiaries of NatWest Group.

From the world’s first overdraft, and the first house purchase loan by a UK bank, to the first fully-fledged internet banking service, the bank has a history of making life easier for its customers. The bank is committed to serving communities and putting the interests of their 1.8m personal customers first.

Challenge

RBS wished to digitalize part of their face-to-face induction training in order to form a blended learning approach for their new starters. The main purpose was to reduce the amount of time that inductees were spending in the classroom and to provide a more consistent approach to induction across their global locations.

The learning objectives for this bespoke online module were for new employees to:

RBS wanted the solution to not only communicate the key induction information but also give the audience a strong sense of familiarity with the RBS headquarters in Gogarburn, Edinburgh. Due to the global scale of the business, most employees aren’t likely to get the chance to visit the Head Office but an e-learning module could provide a realistic experience for individuals, allowing them to virtually explore the site and learn some useful and interesting facts.

As certain parts of the content are likely to change in the future, RBS requested that the course be specifically built in Articulate Storyline 2 which allows them to carry out future edits using in-house skills.

Team-up

Thanks to our history of providing high quality and highly engaging courses for RBS, they contacted Learning Pool with a request for assistance. From the outset, RBS made it clear that they favoured a collaborative approach to the solution creation; allowing their team to learn from us along the way.

Taking this on board, we agreed and clearly outlined the points on the project timeline where we would work closely with RBS’s in-house L&D team. Such milestones included talking RBS through the scripting process before beginning the first draft, a face to face review of the script once complete, and an in-depth discussion of how the course was built, and images created, with our expert Graphic Design team.

A gamified solution

Learning Pool created a bespoke learning module that presents the key aspects of the RBS induction through interactive screens and gamified activities. The content covers typical induction topics, such as company structure, values, brand and history, each visually represented by a different area within the Head Office.

The learner is given a warm welcome to the module with an introductory animation featuring scenes from around the Head Office campus, accompanied by voice-over audio.

Our Graphic Designers used a bespoke illustrative style – minimalistic architectural, flat vector style with solid colours – to recreate interior and exterior scenes from the Head Office environment. They used photographs captured at a specially organised shoot as reference material in order to make the visuals as realistic as possible. This approach gives an exploratory feel to the piece, as learners view different areas of the site when they move between the topics of the module.

Inspired by RBS’s L&D team, who suggested a puzzle piece collection function, we designed the module to reward learners with pieces of the RBS ‘Blueprint for Success’ for completing activities. The pyramid image built up gradually to deliver key information at the end of the module, working as an incentive for learners to complete it. This puzzle feature, along with the bespoke activities woven throughout the topics, gave a gamified feel to the module.

Finally, we used a range of interactive screens to present content in an engaging way. RBS provided a number of videos for us to feature which helped to bring some of the key learning points to life such as the content on the RBS brand.

To meet RBS’s accessibility requirements, we created a PDF version of the course which included transcripts of the videos.