Although South Wales Police covers approximately 10% of the geographical area of Wales, it is home to 1,225,900 people. This equates to around 42% of the country's whole population and includes the Welsh cities of Cardiff and Swansea, which continue to expand and provide their own policing challenges. Add to that the four million or more tourists that visit the area every year and you have a diverse and complex policing environment to address. South Wales Police is committed to meeting these challenges with flexibility to ensure that the force effectively serves the communities it polices.

To be able to achieve this, the force must place a great deal of emphasis on the training and development of its own staff. However, before Perception, South Wales Police found that the delivery of these assessments was laborious and inefficient, as it was a paper-driven process. In order to improve this situation and to derive more value from the assessments created, Sergeant Alun Williams, Technology Enhanced Learning at South Wales Police, began to scope a programme to introduce online learning and assessment within the force. This was to develop a wide range of police specific training for operational officers and police staff, as well as a menu of soft skill courses.

The implementation phase went without a hitch. South Wales Police was the first customer to purchase and integrate Perception with the Kallidus LMS and yet the installation went extremely well. The force has also implemented a full-blown test server or beta environment on which to install upgrades and to carry out regression testing.

Alun Williams adds, “Considering we were a ‘first’ for the integration for these products, the installation could not have been smoother. Already, the software has done more than we set out to achieve and training has been less than the envisaged challenge. The new software is helping to drive up standards in that users can now be more easily and robustly exposed to invigilated assessment. Also, we are reaping considerable business benefits in assessing in the workplace rather than at HQ as we did before. Less abstraction time, less cost and less wasted trainer time all impact greatly on the effectiveness of the force. And, with no exam papers to mark or results to communicate things run more efficiently now. In fact, our online learning and assessments have resulted in an efficiency gain of some £60,000 in the area of Microsoft ‘Office97’ alone.

Questionmark was founded in the UK in 1988 and was one of the first software companies to provide an authoring framework to create tests and assessments to run on PCs. Today the company offers a full range of software for the testing and assessment marketplace spanning Windows 3.X and 95, DOS, Macintosh and web environments. Businesses, governments, and universities in over 40 countries now use Questionmark software.

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