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Blogs

Training today's modern workforce in defence

15/02/2019

Tanya Beech

The modern workforce is driven by flexibility and agility and every aspect of business needs to change to reflect this, including the way in which people train.

QinetiQ training in virtual environment at sea

Traditionally, military exercises have taken place in the physical world. These involved bringing people together in a shared environment, for days at a time, to participate in simulated scenarios, practising for future conflicts and missions. In more recent years, with the development of synthetic technology, we have seen a shift towards the virtualisation of these exercises. However, as our working environments continue to change, how can we continue to build on this and deliver complex manpower intensive training of this nature in an ever more flexible way?

The key is bringing the right new technology together in the correct way.

Over the last two decades, QinetiQ has trained many thousands across the armed forces acting, not just as a provider of technology, but more as a strategic training partner. Many Industry suppliers today will champion their own particular element of technology − a simulator, a ‘war-game’ that can be used for training, or a supporting piece of software or hardware.  Our philosophy is different and is to remain ‘technology agnostic’, meaning we are free to source the best and most relevant technology the market has to offer – collating disparate technologies – and then integrating them together to offer a holistic common user interface.

Clearly, there are significant cost efficiencies associated with this approach, not least the fewer resources required to manage each element of technology. However, this approach can also help to ensure increased flexibility, whilst remaining highly secure – critical in the military environment.

An example could be a trainee wanting to engage in a large scale training exercise but having to remain out of the office, the exercise is secure however their internet connection is not. As system integrator, we would ensure that multiple disparate systems could communicate securely, perhaps, in this instance, through a filter box that would ensure multi-level security to a number of different working environments.

This approach can be extended to connect not just internal UK environments but connect the UK to those of our International training partners also – importantly ensuring that each side training only sees what is appropriate and that will enable them to participate in the training successfully.

By understanding how our customers work, what they like and do not like, where they want to go in the future, how they control training and what they do, we are  able to integrate information and offerings and present them in a way that’s effective and what the customer wants

We pride ourselves on our innovative, strategic partnership approach and ability to harness a wide array of technologies, all of which allow our customers to do more, for less money, enabling greater flexibility with the assets they have today, and offering many more options for tomorrow.

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