Overview

Fun. Safe. Caring. Pioneering. These descriptors apply to one of the largest and most successful swim schools in Sydney, Australia. The Carlile name is synonymous with the history of world swimming. Founders Forbes and Ursula Carlile built their reputation on the back of a mission statement displayed at their headquarters which in part said “Our objective is not to produce a champion but to provide an atmosphere where champions are inevitable.”

That ethos of creating an atmosphere where success is inevitable guided their lives. Forbes Carlile passed away on August 2, 2016, but his legacy lives on. Carlile Swimming continues to set the gold standard for swim teaching, serving as a breeding ground for excellence.

The Challenge

Growing and scaling a company requires the infrastructure and technology to support such gains. As Carlile expanded its operations and launched headlong into a digital transformation, it quickly discovered that a manual and disjointed legacy management system (LMS) was holding it back. To cultivate its development, Carlile needed to meet the following challenges:

Compliance and regulation

Swim teaching is a highly regulated industry, with errors having dire consequences. Ensuring the safety of students and staff is paramount. Carlile needed a solution that reduced the burden of compliance, making them “audit-ready” year-round.

Consistency without proximity

Carlile faced a unique challenge with its deskless workforce. It needed to ensure its instructors were teaching to the Carlile Swimming standards of excellence. An easily accessible solution with the dexterity to reach its casual workforce was in order. Choosing a system that granted sign-on privileges for workers with private emails was a possible resolution.

Verification of skills

Previously, Carlile administrative staff manually assessed critical on-the-job skills, tracking worker progress across paper documents and complicated spreadsheets. The administration team was in search of a platform it could customize to:

• Provide digital solutions across all training environments and platforms, transitioning away from previous LMS and manual processes.
• Provide observation checklists to verify instructor lessons via e-Learning applications.
• Offer flexibility in handling massive imports of historical skills data from the school’s 50 years of manual records.
• Provide workforce insights and engage team members via a flexible skills framework.
• Verify and manage instructors’ national licenses and qualifications (CPR, First Aid, Child Worker Clearances). The ability to set expiration dates for professional licensure and mandatory clearances and trigger notifications for non-compliance to supervisors was a crucial component for inclusion. This work previously was completed manually, which produced inaccuracies.
• Report the organization’s compliance with statutory regulations for the industry. Advanced reporting of workforce capabilities would ensure staff skills aligned with business requirements, learning and development occurred on schedule, and workforce reporting remained accurate.
• Provide ongoing professional training and development, delivery, and tracking capabilities. Classroom training could be transformed into asynchronous learning.
• Deliver a device-agnostic mobile solution for desk-less workers to access from anywhere and through multiple devices (cell phones, desktop computers, laptops, tablets).
• Track nationally recognized qualifications staff must attain to represent the Carlile Swim brand. The process must integrate into their in-house proprietary training, with trainees receiving partial RPL credit toward these national qualifications. The solution will allow a hybrid process capable of tracking internally and externally earned credentials. Improved accuracy of this data helps Carlile meet insurance and GST legislation mandates.

Xapify’s team had an additional challenge in serving Carlile. It was tasked with replacing the legacy system at no additional cost to the business beyond the human resources required to implement a solution. Challenge accepted – and met.

Our Approach

To meet Carlile’s needs, the Xapify team created a platform known internally as COLR-X (Carlile Online Learning Resource – Experience). COLR-X suits a range of users across the swim organization:

• Customer service representatives
• Coordinators
• Facility managers
• Head office administrators
• Supervisors
• Swim teachers

Migrating and setting up the COLR-X solution required some ingenuity from Xapify’s design team. The migration was complex because it involved transferring 50 years of historical data from the previous LMS. Moving and mapping old skills data into the new taxonomy was an ambitious endeavor. The Xapify team delivered the project on time and within budget.

The Benefits

The platform does more than function as a traditional eLearning environment. The broad feature set of Xapify implemented business processes, competency frameworks, and skill assessments possible under the same program.

COLR-X represents more than an implementation of learning technology. It is a re-engineering of training operations that involves supervisors in the digital assessment of employees and the management of staff licensing and credentials. Thanks to this new technology, skill development and required training can occur without interrupting workflow.

The digitization of skill frameworks offers cost savings, efficiency, and data reporting anyone can use to understand the competency and skills of the Carlile swim teaching staff in real-time. COLR-X’s key features include:

• Accessibility of completed theory modules from the previous LMS.
• Boards to display the availability of additional resources.
• Digital observational skills verification.
• Extensive use of expiry notification to ensure compliance with qualifications mandated through insurance and GST regulations.
• Management of external licenses and clearances like AUSTSWIM, CPR and First Aid training, National Teaching Qualifications (Swim Australia Teacher), and Working with Children Checks.
• Skills matrix for real-time reviewing of tasks and skills required for specific roles and the current competency and skill level of each team member.
• Supervisor dashboard for easier monitoring of staff in real-time.
• Tiered skill and competency framework to ensure staff compliance with industry regulations.
• User-friendly accessibility options for desk-less workers.
• Widespread use of pathways with built-in, automated contingencies and the reassignment or alternate assignment of learning.
• Workflow engine for efficient management of business processes.

The Results

Paperwork is cumbersome, takes up unnecessary space, and can go missing at the drop of a dime. Equally burdensome is storing all your company data and sensitive documents on desktop computers accessible only from a centralized worksite.

COLR-X effectively replaces these outdated manual systems. With the new system in place, Carlile’s team now enjoys:

• A 100 percent improvement in compliance qualifications tracking.
• A 70 percent reduction in the staff set-up processing time.
• A 70 percent improvement in the assignment of correct training.
• A 60 percent improvement in the completion of staff theory training.
• An 80 percent improvement in the tracking of completions for practical.
• A 25 percent improvement in staff onboarding times.
• A 75 percent improvement in the time required to learn and renew skills.

Best of all, COLR-X significantly reduced the amount of administrative time required by coordinators and operations managers. “Overall, it’s more automated, and there are many opportunities to correct the information entered before confirming everything,” said David DuBois, Carlile’s Swim Program Curriculum Manager. “Previously, we needed to enter dates manually, and this created a lot of inaccuracies, including problems tracking expiry.”

Xapify’s COLR-X platform supports a more connected and empowered workforce at Carlile Swimming.