in-SITE supports the way people want — and need — to learn

If you want to save a few hundred dollars and learn how to change your vehicle’s brakes by yourself, you’re likely not going to take an automotive course at the local community college. You’re probably going to YouTube or a similar video platform to learn by watching one of the tons of DIY videos on how to remove those rusted-on brake pads.

Traditional legacy training approaches are inadequate to address the rapid pace at which the modern workforce must learn new skills. This is detrimental, leaving the workforce either ill-equipped for positions or unemployable altogether.

“You don’t upskill and scale your workforce by sending everyone back to school. That’s just not feasible,” said Anne Little, Ph.D., program management director of immersive technologies. “Your workforce has to learn and improve at a rate matching the speed of IT modernization efforts."

To match that speed, SAIC has transformed our approach and infrastructure to meet new workforce training needs.

Transformative training approaches

Using readily available open source platforms for workforce training is not a feasible option, either. Doing so puts your agency's intellectual property at risk.

In creating a secure, modern learning infrastructure that is also cloud-native, serverless, and extensible, SAIC relied on the same approaches that our software engineers use to transform legacy IT systems. Our in-SITE solution helps organizations quickly upskill their workforces through the delivery of rapid, highly targeted instruction.

SAIC’s first use case for in-SITE was with the company’s Digital Engineering (DE) team. DE technologies have transformed many facets of engineering practices — from planning, designing, constructing, managing assets and operations — and created an unprecedented upskilling demand.

As a first step, the DE team created a suite of videos showing how to implement their new DE tools and techniques. However, they didn't have a mechanism through which to share their content, collect feedback, or keep videos organized. in-SITE addressed each of these issues and has allowed the team to expand, continuously learn, and meet their mission.

"We can use this platform to rapidly expand our workforce tenfold," said Lara Bove, SAIC instructional system design principal. "When you need to grow a workforce in that magnitude, you can't use old practices."

Finding the needle in a haystack

SAIC recognizes that we can best support the way people want to learn by democratizing training where people both curate what they want and share their expertise within the organization. in-SITE provides the training and knowledge sharing environment and uses the open-source search solution known as Elasticsearch, where metatagging becomes a moot point.

"Through in-SITE, you can get to the right video at a granular concept level, and avoid confusion caused by not using the correct search words," Little said. "Elasticsearch capabilities allow learners to find their training needle in the haystack."

Once users find the videos they want, they can create playlists of all videos related to a specific tool or task and share them with other members of their teams.

MORE TRANSFORMATIVE VISUAL TRAINING: Delivering 3D reference models at the point of need

Uncovering insights

Through the cloud-native analytics directly embedded into in-SITE, we know who watched a video, for how long, and on what platform. in-SITE delivers more information about how people consume learning materials than traditional learning systems with no additional coding overhead.

The cloud-native platform also has built-in rating systems and commenting features for each asset. This allows embedded user tracking that enables training developers to know which videos are in demand and where there may be a need for further education and training.

“We have exponentially more understanding into how people are consuming training assets, which informs us as to what our pain points are,” Little said.

The work environment and the learning environment can no longer remain two separate entities. in-SITE blends the two together seamlessly, enabling continuous learning and growth where individuals and teams train and learn as they work.