Qantas flight attendants meet compliance requirements

Citation

(2006), "Qantas flight attendants meet compliance requirements", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 38 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ict.2006.03738aab.003

Qantas flight attendants meet compliance requirements

An e-learning project for flight attendants working for Qantas is not only proving highly popular with the learners but also is helping the Australia-based airline to meet its compliance obligations under national and international law.

Patric Moberger, Qantas manager of customer-service training and development (CSTD), explained: “The airline industry is heavily regulated by national and international governments. To comply with these regulations, Qantas needs to ensure that all flight attendants are trained in the standard operating procedures, including safety and service processes.”

Qantas CSTD needed to design a programme that could be delivered to all flight attendants on an annual basis through the Qantas online learning-management system, Qantas College Online. He said: “Since our existing flight attendants were already competent in their jobs, we saw an opportunity of doing something different, with a question-and-answer type of programme that was fun, interactive and highly competitive.” “Our challenge was for the programme to keep the learner’s attention for a maximum of 30 minutes, since the module is attached to an already-existing face-to-face programme and that was all the time we had available for it.”

Initially, Qantas designed a board game that looks similar to Monopoly. Questions answered correctly help the learner to collect points that can be redeemed for business-related prizes.

Patric Moberger explained: “We did not have facilitators available to deliver the programme, so we thought of translating this game into an online programme. We asked e-learning specialist Tata Interactive Systems (TIS) for support, since the company had previously helped us with a product/process programme for our domestic flight attendants.”

The programme was delivered on time and to great acclaim – both from end-users and from the project team. He continued: “We did not experience any problems over the geographical distances involved, with the programme being developed mainly in India for delivery in Australia.” “Even though this was not within the scope of the project, TIS offered us ongoing help and support after the implementation date. This was exceptionally reassuring for a non-technical manager like me.”