Atlas Knowledge Centre heralds major boost to learning for Oil and Gas Industry
Atlas, the leading international learning and skills provider, has announced the launch of its Atlas Knowledge Centre, delivering a cloud-based learning solution to the oil and gas industry to support employee learning and knowledge acquisition and so improve work performance.
Being deployed via the cloud, The Knowledge Centre is a truly mobile learning platform, accessible anytime and anywhere across a wide variety of media devices, from laptops to mobile phones.
Atlas, which has its headquarters in Aberdeen in the United Kingdom, has one of the world’s largest portfolios of e-learning content focused on the oil and gas industry, covering health, safety, environment, compliance, risk and technical subjects for upstream and downstream, office and shore based operations and offers more than 200 industry focused courses.
The Knowledge Centre is aimed at employees within the oil and gas industry who need anything from concentrated deep dive study of a subject, to a quick reference or reminder of how a particular process or equipment works.
The value of the system is that both new and experienced employees can refresh and grow their knowledge in relation to the job they are about to perform, which is proven to enhance retention and embedding in the long-term memory. (Source: 2005 Harold Stolovitch and Erica Keeps ; and Charles Jennings 2010)
For many years the Atlas e-learning content library has offered the ideal vehicle for structured learning about technical topics in exploration and production sector of the oil and gas industry, now it has gone a massive step further. By unlocking the company’s learning resources and making them fully searchable in the enterprise-wide and scalable solution, the Atlas Knowledge Centre offers employees access to technical definitions and explanatory rich-media content, containing animations, audio narrative and descriptive text.
The Knowledge Centre has recently undergone a successful trial with a leading North Sea operator and both the feedback and results have been impressive, with the company now signed up for roll out across the UK to hundreds of personnel, with potential global expansion to its workforce worldwide.
As well as full access to thousands of technical pages of content Atlas’s unique conversion process, Harvester, can integrate client’s specific content such as e-learning courses, operating procedures, training manuals and company policies, rendering them fully searchable, maximising the full potential of the company’s knowledge resources and extending unrivalled ease of access to all employees globally.
Unlike the structure of a formal e-learning course (Just In Case), the Knowledge Centre is aligned to the Informal Learning model (Just In Time), where employees can access information specific to their immediate need. This is achieved by searching context related terms that incrementally returns real-time suggestions (similar to that used by Google or Amazon) and is carried out online via the desktop, laptop, smart phone, tablet, iPhone or iPad.
The changing learning styles of the working population in oil and gas, call for a radical change and it is widely believed that focus on informal learning and delivering knowledge where and when it is needed most, will lead to enhanced employee performance, ergo increased business improvement.
John Rowley, chief executive officer of Atlas, said: “Senior managers I have talked to recognise their employees are far more accustomed to quick reference and search driven activities as a way of acquiring knowledge at the point of need. In turn, that needs new technologies and delivery platforms that cannot currently be met by traditional formal learning methods alone.
“It is an awareness that is sharpened by an issue of particular and vital significance for oil and gas. The industry is struggling to replace its retirement-nearing ‘expert’ generation with much younger employees, who will have to achieve Subject Matter Expert (SME) status much more quickly in an ever-changing workplace. As this new generation does not have the embedded ‘tacit’ knowledge of its elders, we can now make it available to them through the new tools of the trade: learning and performance support platforms.
“The Atlas Knowledge Centre, which can flexibly be deployed on any device, holds the promise of increasing access to knowledge and learning, multiplying training opportunities in what would otherwise be staff downtime, catering for the specific needs and learning style of the new generation of learners, and providing just-in-time learning, delivered in an engaging and media-rich fashion at the point of need.”
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