How the RAC automated training delivery across a dispersed, regulated workforce

The RAC has been keeping British drivers moving for almost 130 years. As the UK’s leading breakdown insurer, it operates around the clock: patrols responding to callouts at midnight, mobile mechanics servicing cars at the roadside, contact centre colleagues handling calls 24 hours a day. More than half of the RAC’s workforce is remote or on the road at any given time. 

For Laura Burrows, Digital Learning Manager, that reality shapes everything about how she thinks about training. Her job is to make sure thousands of colleagues — across radically different roles, each with their own regulatory requirements — receive exactly the right training at exactly the right time. Without a system built for that complexity, it is the kind of job that can consume an L&D team entirely. 

Access LMS Evo, and specifically its registration rules functionality, changed the equation. 

The RAC’s workforce is anything but homogeneous. Roadside patrols have specific safety and competency requirements before they can work a callout. Mobile mechanics carry different certifications. Contact centre colleagues must meet FCA standards. Office staff have their own mandatory training profile. And then there is the added complexity of an older demographic in the field — people more comfortable with a spanner than a laptop — who need training delivered in a way that doesn’t create barriers. 

The previous LMS the RAC had used for twelve years could not handle this nuance. It did the bare minimum: hosted content, tracked completions. But it could not intelligently target training to specific cohorts, could not automate enrolments, and could not scale to meet the needs of a business growing in complexity. 

The result was an L&D team that spent too much of its time on manual admin — checking who had been enrolled, chasing completions, reformatting compliance reports through macros — rather than on the work that actually develops people and moves the organisation forward. 

Access LMS Evo’s registration rules allow administrators to build automated enrolment logic directly from their HR hierarchy. When a colleague joins a particular team, holds a specific role, or reaches a defined point in their employment — the system enrols them in the appropriate training automatically. No manual checking. No spreadsheet cross-referencing. No chasing. 

For a workforce as varied as the RAC’s, this is not a convenience. It is a fundamental shift in how training delivery works. 

The five-minute setup is not a throwaway detail. It represents the difference between a system that demands constant attention and one that runs intelligently in the background. Laura builds a rule, defines the logic, and moves on. The system handles the rest. 

Laura has developed her own extension of the registration rules concept that she calls “cascade rules”, a chain of automatic enrolments where completing or beginning one course or form triggers enrolment in the next. 

The probation process is the clearest example. What was previously a manual, multi-step process — check form one is assigned, check form two is ready, follow up on form three — now runs itself. A new starter is enrolled in the first probationary form. Completion of that form automatically triggers enrolment in the second. The third follows the second. Laura does not need to check. She does not need to chase. She knows it is done. 

The same logic extends across competency processes, regulatory sign-offs, and any training pathway where sequence matters. The cascade means nothing slips through the gaps, not because someone remembered to check, but because the system is designed so that checking is unnecessary. 

The registration rules story does not end at enrolment. It extends into how compliance data flows through the organisation. Access LMS Evo allows Laura to build scheduled reports that are generated and distributed automatically (to line managers, to the health and safety team, to whoever needs visibility) each filtered to show only the data relevant to the recipient. 

Line managers see their team. The health and safety team sees their whole department. Nobody has to filter out irrelevant data. Nobody has to request a report. It arrives, targeted and readable, without anyone having to ask for it. 

The practical implications became vivid the day of our interview. Laura had a training module launching the following morning — targeted specifically at mobile mechanics — with a tight completion window. She had already set up automated reporting to flow to the relevant line managers and the health and safety team. She was about to go on annual leave. 

That image of an L&D manager on holiday while a targeted training campaign runs, tracks and reports itself is not a fantasy about future technology. It is what Access LMS Evo makes possible today. 

The RAC operates in a heavily regulated environment. It is audited by its own internal teams, by HSE, by ISO, and by corporate partners. Before Access LMS Evo, preparing for an audit meant running manual exports and reworking the data into a usable format. Now, Laura can pull a compliance overview instantly and show an auditor the live system in the room. 

The confidence this creates is not just operational. It changes how the L&D team is perceived internally. Compliance is no longer a source of anxiety or reactive scrambling. It is something the RAC can demonstrate, at any moment, with complete confidence. 

None of this happened automatically. The registration rules that now run the RAC’s training delivery were designed and configured by Laura, who onboarded the entire platform in seven weeks, largely by herself, working fourteen-hour days at the most intense points. 

What made that possible, she says, was the relationship with her Customer Success Manager. Three years into that relationship, the value of continuity is something she talks about with real conviction. 

“I want a system that works for me. My CSM knows the platform inside out, back to front. If I’m thinking about setting something up in a particular way, I can bounce ideas off him. He knows how I’ve built things and why. That context makes everything faster.” -  Laura Burrows, Digital Learning Manager, RAC 

The Support Engineer, who has been with Laura for two and a half years, carries the same weight in her account of the relationship. 

“I love my support engineer. She’s brilliant. She gets things turned around immediately. I can’t think of a time something hasn’t been solved first time.” - Laura Burrows, Digital Learning Manager, RAC 

As the RAC has embedded Access LMS Evo more deeply into business-critical processes — probation, competency sign-offs, regulatory compliance — that support relationship has become correspondingly more important. A system issue is no longer just a learning inconvenience. It matters to the business. 

Laura’s vision for where Access LMS Evo goes next centres on taking the automation principle further. The Copilot AI assistant she describes would allow line managers to query their team’s training status in plain language — asking what is outstanding, what has been completed, where the gaps are — without needing to navigate dashboards or wait for a scheduled report. 

For a small L&D team trying to serve a large, dispersed workforce, that kind of capability is not incremental. It is another step change: moving the intelligence of the system closer to the people who need it, at the moment they need it, without requiring anyone to go looking. 

The registration rules that transformed how the RAC delivers training were the beginning. The automation story is still being written.