How the RAC has spent ten years giving its people genuine ownership of their own careers 

The RAC runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Its patrols and mechanics are on the road at 3am. Its contact centre colleagues are taking calls through the night. Laura Burrows, Digital Learning Manager, is, as she freely admits, a 9-to-5 person. The maths doesn’t work. 

That realisation didn’t come from L&D strategy alone. It came from the colleagues themselves. Employee surveys and feedback across the business surfaced the same appetite: people wanted somewhere to go when they were thinking about their careers. Not just mandatory training. Not just compliance modules. A place that was genuinely for them, available when they needed it, focused on where they wanted to go. 

Access Careers Centre answered that call. And it has been doing so for ten years. 

Ten years is a long time in any technology relationship. The fact that the RAC has stayed with Access Careers Centre through platform evolutions, rebrands and organisational change is itself a signal worth paying attention to. 

What has kept it is not nostalgia. It is the practical reality that no other solution has come close to doing what Access Careers Centre does for a workforce as large, as distributed and as varied as the RAC’s. 

The philosophy behind how the RAC uses Access Careers Centre is rooted in a single belief about how development actually works. 

In practice, that means giving colleagues the tools to self-assess, identify their own gaps, and find content to address them without waiting for a manager or an L&D team member to point them in the right direction. The platform’s career assessments, which Laura says she reruns herself every few months just to see how her thinking has evolved, are the starting point for those journeys. 

Line managers then build on that foundation. At the start, midpoint and end of each performance year, managers sit down with their teams and use the platform to help colleagues pinpoint where they want to go and what they need to get there. The Careers Centre gives those conversations structure and substance they would otherwise lack. Laura states it plainly:

The arithmetic of L&D at the RAC is stark - only a handful of people make up the central team, whereas there are thousands of colleagues across the country. There is simply no way for the team to reach everyone directly. Access Careers Centre makes it possible to do so indirectly. 

This is the quiet multiplier that case studies rarely capture. Access Careers Centre doesn’t replace the L&D team. It extends what that team can achieve, taking the intent behind every career conversation and making it available at any hour, in any location, without any additional headcount. 

When asked about the link between Access Careers Centre usage and retention, Laura is careful. Causality in people data is hard to establish. But the pattern is clear enough to carry weight. 

It is, as the story hook suggests, the benefit no one talks about loudly enough. Career development at the RAC is not marketed as a perk or a headline in recruitment campaigns. It is simply there, available, waiting for the colleagues who seek it out. And those colleagues, reliably, are the ones who stay and grow. 

One of the most distinctive things about how the RAC uses Access Careers Centre is the breadth of content it surfaces to colleagues. Career development, at the RAC, is not a synonym for professional skills. It is a genuine commitment to the whole person. 

Access Careers Centre has been at the RAC for ten years. But it is the ongoing relationship, not just the technology, that has made that longevity meaningful. 

Laura has had the same Customer Success Manager for almost three years. She speaks about that continuity not as a nice-to-have, but as a genuine business advantage. 

The Premier support package which gives the RAC a named CSM and a dedicated support analyst, was, she says, one of the reasons the RAC chose Access in the first place when it came to the LMS decision. Having already experienced what a strong support relationship felt like through the Careers Centre, the team knew what they were looking for. 

Laura’s next chapter for Access Careers Centre involves deepening the connection between digital and face-to-face development. The plan is to create pathways that wrap content around internal workshops, pre-learning before the session to build a shared foundation, post-learning to embed what was covered. Career development that doesn’t end when the room empties. 

For a workforce that spans nightshifts and motorway hard shoulders, that kind of wrap-around support matters. And Access Careers Centre - still going, still growing, after ten years - is the platform making it possible.