Some professional skills you learn in training courses or through formal coaching, but most you pick up on-the-job from a colleague at work. In our personal lives, when we want to pick up a practical skill, most of us turn to YouTube for a quick tutorial video. What if learning practical skills at work could be like that?
Our team worked with a group of grass-roots innovators within the Metropolitan Police’s ‘Commissioner’s 100’ programme who had an existing prototype for bite-sized, peer to peer video learning they had created.
We helped expand and develop this over 18 months into Metflix: a robust, flexible platform to help colleagues follow the right procedures, and share their own expertise, and for central teams in the organisation to push out learning on key skills in video format.
Metflix is available to Met Police officers on their phones or larger devices. It’s designed to be ‘public proof’ – i.e. no sensitive content that couldn’t be made public. But these are niche videos that benefit from a more custom environment than YouTube itself.
Not every video is perfect, but the idea is to encourage sharing of practical expertise whatever equipment you have to hand. Metflix lowers the barriers to producing and sharing practical training material with colleagues, so that any officer can make a video of up to 3 minutes’ length, with nothing more than their phone.
We’ve introduced concepts like ratings, video feedback, approved videos (reviewed by subject matter experts), and channels to showcase guidance from different Met teams.
