BCITO. Building the people who build
New Zealand.

BCITO currently works with 9,000+ employers of building and construction apprentices across New Zealand. Its slogan: We’re building people. BCITO’s mission is to have the right people with the right skills in the right place at the right time.

In October 2021, BCITO joined Te Pūkenga Work Based Learning Ltd, a subsidiary of Te Pūkenga – New Zealand Institute of Skills and Technology, as part of the reform of vocational education in New Zealand.

BCITO employs 460 people, supports 21,000 active apprentices across 15 trades, 1,500 people seeking apprenticeships, and 9,000 employers who are involved in training apprentices. By mid-2022, it expects to have more than 35,000 users on its Canvas learning management (LMS) portal.

By enrolments, BCITO is the largest educational organisation supporting on-job learning in New Zealand’s construction industry. More than 252,000 people were enrolled in vocational education and training in that country in 2020, the most recent statistic available. Te Pūkenga is building a national network of integrated learning in Aotearoa New Zealand that better meets the needs of learners, their families, employers, and the community. By bringing together on-the-job, on-campus, and online learning, Te Pūkenga is creating a network that gives learners more choices and flexibility in what, where, and how they learn.

Pre-pandemic, BCITO’s training advisors would interact with apprentices and employers mostly face-to-face during worksites visits, with lengthy travel often necessary. There were a lot of inefficiencies, says Nicki Alori, BCITO’s Digital Learning Product Owner.

“There was no consistent way to capture apprentices’ practical work on their job site. We needed to see evidence of their learning that showed progress, but many apprentices lose their phones, or there’d be few printed-out photos for our training advisors to check on their work,” she says.

As well, apprentices lost motivation because often their progress wasn’t recognised until the 18-month-to-two-year mark, about halfway through their training.

Nicki says: “We didn’t have a Learning Management System in place, so there was no opportunity for our learners to engage with BCITO in a digital space; there was no scope for us to demonstrate our quality customer care via digital channels and, therefore, to add value.”

Push came to shove when Covid-19 arrived.

Nicki says: “That’s when, for a short period during the total lockdown, we couldn’t go on-site and see our apprentices, so we quickly needed to adapt our existing service model.”

At the same time, New Zealand’s vocational educator sector was undergoing reform.

"A fundamental consideration was that our choice of platform needed to have the flexibility to customise customer experience without losing the benefits of a SAAS platform," says Nicki.

Luckily, Nicki had just completed her due diligence to recommend BCITO invest in an LMS.

It had to be laptop friendly and able to be used on iOS and Android smartphones, plus offer local access to the data collected. Other must-haves included:

• Ease of integration and breadth of features, so content could be easily uploaded and exported
• Flexibility to design a customer experience for workbased learning, while not losing the benefits of a SaaS platform
• An app for use on worksites
• Messaging and conferencing functions to facilitate learning, and
• Language support for non-native English speakers.

It also had to meld with the way BCITO works – apprentice learning is never linear.

Nicki says: “Our learners can start and end at any time of the year, so we have 21,000 cohorts of one. There’s a unique training environment for each apprentice and they’ll never have the same conversation because it depends on the work the employer has – a carpenter might have to do insulation first, so they’re not working through the sequence of competencies like you would in a classroom.”

To get BCITO buy-in on her LMS proposal, she detailed and costed out several processes and practices it would help simplify, offering a value proposition for each type of customer – internal and external. Nicki also ran a benefits realisation piece to show how an LMS could reduce apprentice withdrawals, training advisor travel, phone calls and unproductive field visits.

Since going live with the Canvas LMS in June 2021, BCITO has been able to tick off its ‘must haves’ and we are seeing real value for our learners. It’s integrated Salesforce into the LMS and created custom scripts to save time on repetitive administration.

The organisation can easily see the learning portal’s busiest times. It tends to be from 10 am to 11:30 am and after hours. BCITO sends digital announcements strategically and is confident they’ll reach apprentices and employers in realtime.

Another bonus sees BCITO support apprentices to boost their digital literacy as they learn to use the Canvas app for work on their smartphone. The Microsoft Immersive Reader plugin to Canvas is another literacy drawcard.

Nicky says: “Among our apprentices, we have a high rate of English spoken as a second or other language. The Microsoft plugin can read the text aloud in another language, even making the font bigger - great for accessibility and inclusivity. It can be accessed on their phone’s browser, so they can use it on the go. “Canvas is the tool to help close the gap by removing the barriers. It lets apprentices demonstrate their work to their training advisors in real-time and get feedback on the fly.”