Interview: Building training airports can trust

Behind every course on Klayo and the Online Learning Centre is a carefully considered development process designed to make sure the training is relevant, accurate, practical, and genuinely useful to learners. From identifying the right learning need through to shaping the final digital experience, quality is built in at every stage.

We sat down with Kate Williams, our Head of Content Delivery, to understand how that training actually gets made, and what goes into creating courses airports and aviation professionals can trust.

Every course starts with a genuine need

Klayo offers a broad catalogue across fourteen faculties, so each new course is added with a purpose. There is no target set on how many courses to release, every idea has to earn its place. "It's not just building and releasing for the sake of releasing something," Kate says. "It's being strategic and saying, well, what is truly going to meet needs in the industry?"

"It's not just building and releasing for the sake of releasing something, it's being strategic and saying, well, what is truly going to meet needs in the industry?"

There are different ways those needs can be surfaced:

• Regular reviews of each faculty to identify potential gaps.
• Ongoing conversations with airports and industry contacts around real-life training needs.
• Subject matter experts (SMEs), who work close to the day-to-day realities of the industry, often arrive with ideas of their own.
• Significant shifts, such as regulatory changes or new industry practices or technologies, can also highlight a need for new or updated training.

From concept to finished course

“Our course development process always starts with understanding the real learning need: who the audience is, what performance or capability gap we are wanting to fill, and what learners need to be able to do differently as a result of the training.” Kate says.

“We invest considerable thought in shaping the right solution. The scope, learning approach, structure, and content are all carefully designed and validated to ensure the course is focused, coherent, and built around the outcomes learners need to achieve.”

“The scope, learning approach, structure, and content are all carefully designed and validated to ensure the course is focused, coherent, and built around the outcomes learners need to achieve.”

The process relies on a combination of Klayo’s learning and instructional design expertise with subject matter expertise, stakeholder input, and validation from our accreditation partner, Airports Council International (ACI). As Kate explains, “SMEs help ensure the solution is technically accurate and grounded in real-world practice, while our instructional designers shape the content into a clear, logical learning journey that is appropriate for the audience and aligned to the intended outcomes.”

The final stage is digitization: translating that carefully designed solution into an engaging eLearning experience. This is where the learning is brought to life through scenarios, activities, interactions, examples, and other digital elements that help learners understand and apply the content.

The result is training that is not only technically sound, but also purposeful, practical, and designed around the learner, with every element of the course contributing to the intended learning outcomes.

A course is not finished when it launches. Every course sits on a scheduled review cycle to ensure the content remains accurate, current, and relevant, while also considering opportunities to improve the digital experience as e-learning standards evolve. Reviews can also be triggered between cycles by learner feedback, input from an SME or stakeholder, or significant changes in the industry, including regulatory, technological, operational, or best-practice developments.

What the future holds

Over the years, recognition of online learning has grown, particularly its role in blended programs, where solid online foundations make classroom and on-the-job training far more efficient. Looking ahead, there are still many opportunities for online training to become even more relevant and effective and Kate sees clear room to make training more specific to the work people actually do. Understanding what each role requires opens the door to more practical, role-based training, which is exactly the kind of visibility Klayo is built to provide.

While the underlying method behind creating training has held steady over the years, the technology supporting it has evolved drastically with improvements such as narration across courses, video, and richer interactivity, now available to lift the learner experience. AI technology creates another opportunity to make learning more responsive to individual needs, including more personalized learning experiences and support at the point of need. It can also bring greater efficiency to course development, freeing the team to focus on the areas where human expertise adds the most value: understanding the learning need, shaping the right solution, and designing an effective learning experience. But for Kate, AI does not replace the judgement and rigour behind quality training. “If you don't have the right rigour,” she notes, “you're producing training, but are you producing good training?”

"If you don't have the right rigour, you're producing training, but are you producing good training?"

That question sits at the heart of everything Kate's team does. The airports and aviation professionals who rely on Klayo and the Online Learning Centre need training they can trust. Training that reflects the realities of the industry, supports meaningful learning, and helps people perform with confidence. That is why every course is developed with care, drawing on the right technical expertise, instructional design, and industry validation.

The aim is always the same: to create learning that is relevant, engaging, and genuinely useful in practice.