Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games case study: The challenge
Welcome to the first in our new series of posts exploring imc’s project with Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games. In this post, we will reveal the challenge faced by Birmingham 2022 Games, and what they needed from their new learning management system.
About the Commonwealth Games?
The Commonwealth Games bring nations together in a colourful celebration of sport, human performance and culture. Birmingham 2022 will see around 4,500 athletes from 72 nations and territories compete in 19 sports and eight para-sports. Much like the Olympics, the Commonwealth Games takes place every four years, moving cities for each event. As the biggest event ever to be held in the West Midlands, Birmingham 2022 is expected to attract more than one million spectators to the city and have a global TV audience of 1.5 billion.
The training requirement
With each event comes a mammoth training requirement. With a workforce of over 50,000 volunteers, paid employees and contractors to rapidly upskill, Birmingham 2022 needed a learning management system (LMS) to streamline the training process for their diverse team.
To find a new LMS, Birmingham 2022 went through a public procurement process to find the right vendor. Birmingham 2022 has pledged to be the most sustainable yet, so sought a solution that could be reused across a multi-games contract, by Birmingham 2022 and future committees.
For Birmingham 2022, it was vital to ensure efficiency and value for money, so it was crucial that they chose the right LMS from the very beginning. The Commonwealth Games Federation’s vision was for better knowledge transfer between organising committees, with systems and contracts carrying over from one Game to the next to reuse as much as possible.
Plans for a blended learning programme
Birmingham 2022 knew that they wanted a truly blended learning programme, comprising eLearning, digital resources and live face-to-face training sessions. The addition of the online element was relatively new, and driven in part by the challenges posed by COVID-19. This would be in contrast with the very simple LMS used by the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games, which was essentially used for ‘click next’ learning with no tracking or reporting.
The shift in focus to blended learning would enable Birmingham 2022’s training team to ensure that valuable time wasn’t taken out of face-to-face sessions to deliver soft skills training. This meant that workforce would receive their venue-specific training in person, while accessing role-specific and customer service-focused training online for more efficient learning.
Designing for a large, diverse audience
An important part of this project would be the huge learner audience, of 35,000 contractors, 14,000 volunteers and 2,000 paid employees. Additionally, this would be a very diverse audience, comprising different ages and levels of technical ability, meaning the LMS needed to be extremely accessible and user friendly.
With so many volunteers and contractors, Birmingham 2022 needed to ensure that their event scheduling platform, Rosterfy, would communicate with their LMS. This ability to transfer data from Rosterfy to the LMS would save Birmingham 2022 a lot of time that would otherwise be spent on manual data entry.
Finally, the LMS would need to support multiple different user groups over the course of the contract, along with different branding and content, so the chosen LMS needed multitenancy functionality.
Following an extensive tender process, the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games selected imc as their enterprise LMS vendor of choice. The project commenced in November 2021 – nine months before the start of the games. With this in mind, it was time to get to work on creating the perfect solution in a limited timeframe.
Join us for part 2 when we will take a look at the solution imc created for the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games…
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