Case · Aarsleff Rail
Seven minutes on a phone — scanned from a QR code on site
A compulsory safety course that had to work out on the site,
for their own people and for external partners, in several languages.
7 minutesto complete the course
4 languagesDanish, English, German and Polish
QR → certificateaccess and documentation in the same flow
Why the long course does not work here
Safety training is harder than most people think — and not because the audience does not care. Nobody
turns up at work to get hurt, and most of them are right that they know what they are doing.
Which is why going through the rules and then testing whether people remember them rarely works.
The problem is not knowledge. The problem is what you do in the moment. When you are busy. When a colleague is about to do something dangerous. When you assume conditions are the same as yesterday.
Risk habituation: if you have done the same thing many times without trouble, it feels less dangerous. The risk is unchanged.
What was built
You scan a QR code, choose a language, complete it and get a certificate. The course works on
a phone, a tablet or a computer, and is part of the access flow to the site —
so the documentation is a by-product of doing it, rather than an administrative job afterwards.
The content puts you in concrete situations instead of explaining:
You have arrived at the work site. You need to fetch materials some way off. Between
you and the materials lies a track. You were briefed yesterday. What do you do?
The feedback comes only once the choice has been made. If the choice is wrong, there is a brief
moment where the explanation is actually interesting. If it is right, the feedback can be short.
It is a more respectful use of people’s time — and the course asks directly:
would you do the same in real life?
The client’s words · translated from Danish
“It has been important to us to develop a safety course that works in the reality our employees
and partners are in every day. Safety is not only about knowing the rules — it is about being
able to make the right choices in concrete situations.”
Judine Bisgaard, Aarsleff Rail
Why this is the shape of a compliance product
A legal requirement with a deadline is the most common reason anyone builds a course at all. What they rarely get is something that both documents and
changes something. Here the two are the same act: access to the site runs through the course,
and the proof falls out of the other end.
What we cannot claim
We have not measured whether fewer incidents happen at Aarsleff Rail. What the case shows is that
a compulsory safety course can be delivered in seven minutes, in four languages, with
documentation as a by-product — not that it has changed the accident figures.