Mountain Training Spotlight

Notes de l'éditeur

1. I work for Mountain Training; a collection of national awarding organisations for qualifications and skills courses in walking, climbing and mountaineering. Four years ago = 9 databases (5 awarding organisations + 4 membership associations) and all were offline. This meant a fantastic time lag for candidates and a missed opportunity for us to interact better with them. Paper course reports took a month to travel 100 yards so there was a danger that motivated candidates might disconnect with us and our membership association. It also involved 9 specialists and much duplication of data. Between the 5 national boards we administer 13 (soon to be 14) qualifications and a skills scheme. We have candidates all over the UK, all managed by national Mountain Training boards in two offices – Capel Curig and Aviemore. We wanted to create a database that gave candidates and providers direct involvement and access; to manage their course reporting and create a digital record. We were fortunate to be advised by two IT experts: one of whom was the designer of our original database and the other was a media guru, in our competitive tender process. We chose blahdblah who turned out to be a critical (in both senses of the word) developer. They questioned things ‘we’d always done’ which was a really valuable part of the service and alongside building us a database they redeveloped our website.
2. It turned out we were in the middle of an identity crisis. This was largely due to national board politics which had become the dominant issue. So even though we managed to go from this to this, the navigation bar on the website was still these logos, as if who was doing the admin behind the scenes was the most important thing to a candidate!? Thankfully, after much hard work by our staff, great advice from blahdblah and lots of good sense from all our volunteers we moved to this, which is now our only customer facing logo. The background politics is still there but the level of transparency the system allows has enabled us to be much more efficient.
3. The database we were creating needed to be as functional as possible for the candidate so that our partner organisations wanted to be a part of it too. It’s our business to work with membership organisations and rather than our priority being to learn everything we could about ‘our people’, we wanted the system to be functional for as many people as possible. It was a very customer focused project. Pipe dream: wouldn’t it be nice if we had one database instead of 9? (Although we could only actually control 5 of them, the other 4 needed to come along of their own free will.) We went through nearly 3 bespoke versions of what became known as our candidate management system (cms – great acronym to choose given that for most people a cms is a content management system!) during which time all 4 associations integrated into the system. We’re now using a more flexible multi-NGB platform powered by tahdah. As a measure of success, given that roughly 5,000 people engage with us each year by registering on one of our schemes, over the past 4 years a fantastic 40,000 people have started using our online system. Which is double the number we’d expected. Our course providers have been great at accepting this digital shift – implementation and subsequent developments have been very well received. This is quite a surprise in a industry where admin of any kind is a dirty word and something that happens when it’s raining.
4. A digital logbook was stage 2. We stopped printing paper logbooks and started putting that money into developing our digital offering. Logbooks are an integral part of our qualifications and mountains seem to draw those with good practical skills who are often not so good at wielding a pen. So creating an easy to fill in digital form full of drop down menus made the logging process easier for the candidates and their logbook much more presentable than a few scraps of paper. It also enabled tutors, mentors, trainers, assessors, employers and technical officers at Mountain Training to view their log in real time online rather than having a physical logbook that only one person could see. Reinforce our UK wide credentials – skye, n wales, aviemore So we now have two major data sources: our candidate management system and DLOG.
5. So what have we actually learned from all this data? When Sport England’s Active People Survey suggested that under 25 participation was decreasing within our sport as a whole, we could help the British Mountaineering Council demonstrate something different. The bottom line is under 25 registrations and the top line is over 25 registrations across all schemes In fact for some schemes, such as the Climbing Wall Award, the two lines cross over quite regularly and neither are showing signs of decreasing. The Climbing Wall Award is used by climbing wall staff, volunteers and freelance instructors to supervise climbing and bouldering on artificial structures. We’re optimistic that Active Lives will more ably reflect our own insight.
6. The data has also allowed us to prove or disprove for the first time some long held assumptions and anecdotal evidence regarding a number of target groups. 1. There aren’t many women gaining our leadership qualifications. True – on average across all schemes it’s 19% - but this varies from 6% to 38%. (Female participation in the sport is estimated at 36%) 2. Women take longer to get through our qualifications. False – in fact for Mountain Leader, our most popular scheme, on average women complete 6 months quicker than men. And for all other schemes the difference between men and women was between 2 weeks and 2 months. When the total time it takes is being measured in years, a few months here or there seems fairly insignificant. So we’re going to have to work a bit harder at analysing the data we have to see what else we can work out about women in Mountain Training. Part of this involves teaming up with Bangor University to re-evaluate the pathway through our schemes. We’ve used the same model for nearly 52 years: registration, training, consolidation, assessment, cpd. Is it time for that to change and what impact will that have on the number of women getting qualified? On the back of Getting Active Outdoors we’ve got a good relationship with British Cycling and British Canoeing (our closest neighbours) and are working collaboratively to find ways of sharing knowledge eg. British Cycling’s blended learning approach has had a huge impact on their completion rates and we’re working towards sharing e-learning modules on topics such as mountain weather.
7. We call these our Moon stats because we’ve worked out that our candidates have logged enough walks to complete 19 trips to the Moon and back! DLOG has given us some great numbers and figures – the most exciting being that we’re only about a week away from 1 million records! Over the last 2 months we’ve averaged nearly 2,000 per day so by next Wednesday (if not before) we should reach the magic number. So these figures are pretty cool and quite impressive, but not super useful.
8. What’s more useful is drilling down into the details of those figures. These graphs are all for Walking as an activity (not Lowland Walking or Winter Walking) and will largely be made up of entries from candidates going through our Mountain Leader and Hill and Moorland Leader schemes. It’s clear to see when leaders go on holiday and when Christmas is… It’s also easy to identify that the Snowdon Massif is by far the most popular area in which to go mountain walking and 4th most popular is the Glyderau which includes Tryfan, so Plas y Brenin, Sport England’s national Mountain Sports Centre is in the heart of the action – hence our main office base. We can also see how long our coaches are out for and what role they are taking in the day. Walking with ‘equals’ and being a leader/supervisor are the two most popular and shows that people are out getting the experience we require of them and then using their qualifications to lead others. The age graph is also quite reassuring and reflects our experience on the ground. Walking and climbing are activities that appeal to all ages and although it does taper off, there are nearly as many 60 year olds as there are 20 year olds logging walking days in our mountains or hanging out in climbing walls. So with half an eye on attracting people back into walking and climbing at various stages in their life, we’re confident that our activities appeal to a wide audience and we can only do more there. The gender split is less reassuring but I’ve touched on that already.
9. DLOG known unknowns (I thought it best to avoid of photo of Donald Rumsfeld so here’s a shot of some people having a lovely time on Ben Nevis a few winters ago.) We’d love to develop our system further so that we can learn more about what our leaders do with their qualifications. We know from a survey a couple of years ago that on average our award holders work with 267 people in a year. By enabling people to tell us WHO they were working with when they walked up Snowdon as a leader, we’d be able to analyse their impact even further. Are most people working with Scouts? School groups? Adults on 3 peaks challenges? We’re pretty confident we know what sorts of groups they work with but it would be great to know more – do we need to increase our collaborations with key stakeholders such as the Scouts and are we missing some groups altogether? The other thing we’re keen to find out is how candidates journey through each scheme and between schemes. Does this differ for females and if so how?
10. One thing we already know is that some people struggle with the prerequisites for accessing our mountain-based qualifications as they lead busy lives in non-mountainous parts of the country. Three years ago we started a review of our walking qualifications to make sure they were fit for purpose. The end result was the creation of two new schemes (Lowland Leader and Hill & Mountain Skills) and the separation of another scheme into two parts (one leadership and an expedition skills module). The data shows us that Lowland Leader has been really successful in particular regions; the Central Belt in Scotland, the South East of England, the South West and the Midlands. Funny that? Seeing as that’s where most people live and that’s where people were already leading groups in the lowlands, or wanted to, we just provided a nationally accredited qualification for them to access. This particular group are sixth formers from Manchester High School for Girls who were looking for more opportunities to get involved in walking and start leading after completing their Gold Duke of Edinburgh’s Award.
11. The changes to our walking schemes have proved popular and we’re able to see the impact of these as our overall registration figures are continuing to increase year on year despite a decline in some of our older traditional qualifications (Mountain Leader and Single Pitch Award). We’ve been able to use all our knowledge of safety and leadership in the mountains and apply it to lower level terrain with different hazards and in doing so appeal to more people who want to lead or coach others but don’t have the time or inclination to travel to the mountains every weekend. There is more we can do to connect with lowland walkers in the future but so far our ability to adapt to changing demands has been very effective.
12. The slightly bigger challenge is tackling our climbing qualifications, something we’re in the process of doing at the moment, as the majority of people involved in the management of the national boards are more passionate about climbing than walking. Thankfully the data insight we have gained from our system and good response to our survey has given us the confidence to tackle the climbing schemes and our decisions will be based on the evidence rather than gut feeling.
13. Other areas for improvement highlighted by our data include the number of leaders and coaches from Black or Minority Ethnic communities. Our current stats show 3% of qualified leaders which indicates a lot of room for improvement. We’re keen to address this and current schemes for part funding training and assessment courses have been well received and seem like a good place to start to increase the number of role models.
14. Redirecting resources rather than saving money A brilliant ‘glue’ that’s brought separate organisations together Our world is all about quality assurance so transparency is key Dispelled myths and given us a few surprises We feel like we’ve only just scratched the surface and we’re excited about what’s coming next.