Virgin Trains employees often work hundreds of miles from their managers, are physically isolated, and tasked with managing passenger reaction to rail disruption – that they didn’t cause and can do nothing to fix.

The Virgin Trains team were looking to create a digital ‘pre-boarding’ experience that prepared new starts and built their confidence to handle these challenges from day one.

Mind Tools worked with Virgin Trains to create a series of 5-minute resources, sent one per day via email, in the week prior to each participant’s start date.

Each resource was designed to address a single performance outcome:

Day 1: All Aboard! – An animation to encourage new starts to think about how they can create a 'Virgin'.

Day 2: Welcome Back! – A 360 video to help new starts become familiar with their new working environment and explore parts of a train they have never seen before. Google Cardboard headsets, with Virgin Trains branding, were sent to new starts so that they could experience this in VR.

Day 3: Meet Your Colleagues! – An interactive video FAQ to answer the questions that new starts have, but didn’t want to ask in the interview.

Day 4: Welcome to the Arcade! – An arcade game with leaderboard to help new starts build familiarity with the Virgin network.

Day 5: Thank You! – A final welcome video to introduce the training academy team and prepare new stars for their first day.

During the year that this programme was live, 374 new starts joined Virgin Trains.

By using MailChimp to send and track the emails, we saw that 90% of new starts accessed all five resources. 99% accessed at least one.

The 360 video was watched over 2,827 and the arcade game was accessed 58 times by a single person.

This project has also been recognized at industry awards:
Finalist at the Learning Technologies Awards 2019 for ‘Excellence in the Design of Learning Content’
Finalist at the LPI Learning Awards 2020 for ‘External Learning Solution of the Year’.