Ascent Flight Training is a trusted provider of innovative training systems. It employs 420+ staff across six UK sites, designing, developing and delivering training, technology products and technical services for a range of customers across the aerospace, defence, emergency services and energy sectors.
Ascent began to use an LMS for its internal training in 2024. Before that, it sent people on external training courses and delivered elearning, but there was no central place where employees and managers could find what they needed.
Additionally, there were around 400 job roles across Ascent’s employees, making it difficult for the business to understand exactly who needed what training. Ascent needed a way to upskill managers and invest in its people, through a user-friendly, intuitive learning technology that supports an audience with varying degrees of technical know-how.
When Ascent mentioned this need to Future Talent Learning, which managed its leadership training programme, Future Talent Learning recommended 5app’s learning management system (LMS).
Following Future Talent Learning’s recommendation, Ascent quickly determined that 5app was the perfect LMS for its employees and built and launched AscentKnowledge, its new employee training LMS.
AscentKnowledge employee training playlists
A key part of Ascent’s ongoing learning is its ‘Engage and Learn’ sessions. These are tailored to the interests and needs of employees, and involve employees and guests who share their personal experiences, to break down taboos and get people talking. Pre-5app, Engage and Learn sessions were hosted on Ascent’s SharePoint site, but they weren’t available on mobile devices.. By moving this content onto 5app, these sessions are now fully accessible and open to all.
Ascent is also working on moving its mandatory compliance training from an external system onto 5app. This will help ensure a consistent, fully-branded learning environment across all training materials, and will make it easier for employees to perform their jobs safely.
AscentKnowledge was created as a one-stop-shop for all training, upskilling and company documentation, and Ascent’s company handbook is currently being converted into a digital culture handbook that will live on the LMS.
AscentKnowledge will also host Ascent’s additional HR policies. Ascent’s goal is to move towards a more ‘policy-light, principle-based’ approach to its policies, and is building new, more engaging documentation using EasyGenerator to create supporting elearning content. This new approach also requires new manager and employee elearning, which, of course, will also live on 5app and be available to their respective audiences.
Part of Ascent’s work with 5app was to support employee’s learning and development in line with its newly established competency and role framework. Ascent took its original 400+ job descriptions and whittled them down to just over 100, defining role families and career paths, they then mapped their 12 defined competencies to each role profile. This required an extensive effort, with the new competency and role framework providing a clear connection between job roles, related competencies and, most importantly, the training required to achieve each competency.
AscentKnowledge competency framework in 5app
The competency framework lives in a flipbook, which employees can use to drill down into each competency and access Future Talent Learning’s training modules. With this smart solution, employees are now greeted with tailored, hyper-relevant training content on the home screen every time they log into the platform, creating a much more personalised learning experience.
“The 5app team has really helped bring my vision to life. Linking our competencies with the related leadership training has elevated our entire learning experience. It’s been incredible!”
- Lara Vallence, Senior People and Culture Manager, Ascent Flight Training
Buy-in from Ascent’s leadership team ensured that the internal launch of 5app was a big success. Not only did the platform launch on time, but Ascent also worked closely with 5app to create an internal comms plan to get users excited, including a QR code for easy mobile access, employee onboarding videos, company communications and Engage and Learn sessions to demo the LMS to employees.
Welcome to AscentKnowledge launch video
To date, around 80% of Ascent’s 420 employees are using the 5app platform, with 5app's ease of use exceeding all expectations.
To achieve such positive employee engagement, Ascent made use of 5app’s nudge functionality, to help remind employees who hadn’t yet logged into the system to take a look. This helped improve employee engagement by around 26% with each nudge, demonstrating the power of these quick and easy reminders.
“This entire project has gone amazingly! It's one of the best supplier partnerships I’ve ever encountered, and it’s made this entire project so easy.”
Feedback from Ascent’s employees has been excellent. Employees have approached the HR team with ideas for the platform, and managers have been asking to use AscentKnowledge to host departmental policies and training. The HR team will meet with each functional head to find out how they can best support each team to move their assets onto 5app.
“Everything in 5app is exactly where you think it should be. It’s clean, professional and easy to navigate, and it’s been incredible for helping us drive the company forward.”
Ascent is now working hard to move its onboarding process onto 5app. This is currently a very manual, admin-heavy process, involving a lot of meeting scheduling and booking people onto Microsoft Teams calls, so switching to 5app’s playlists will save Ascent significant time and effort.
Ascent is excited about the possibilities opened up by 5app, and is currently considering how they could use 5app’s upcoming AI features, including its AI chat agent, which could save Ascent’s HR admin a lot of time answering simple questions. They’re currently looking at setting up a proof of concept to experiment with this exciting new technology.