The Harcourts Academy began using aXcelerate’s student management system in order to automate more of their administrative and operational processes as well as effectively managing their AVETMISS reporting.
Background Information
Harcourts was first launched in New Zealand in 1888 and in 1997 the organisation expanded its operations into Australia, opening of six offices across Queensland and a state office in Brisbane.
In 2002, Harcourts expanded their operations further by launching the Academy, a training academy providing courses for real estate sales, management and administration. The aim of this venture was to increase Harcourt’s steady growth by entering the learning space as well being able to assist those wanting a career in real estate and growing their skills. In 2006 Harcourts Academy achieved RTO status, which allowed industry licensing to students enrolling in Academy programmes.
Since its launch, Harcourts Academy has been a highly successful component of Harcourts; on average 1,000 classroom students enrol in Academy courses per month, across the ten countries Harcourts now operates in.
A big drawcard for these students are the Sales Registration courses, which are tailored to individuals who do not have previous real estate experience. Because a considerable portion of the Academy’s demographic are students looking to embark on a career in real estate, these courses are especially appealing. Another considerable drawcard for students is the organisation’s 125 years’ experience in the real estate industry. Furthermore, Harcourts provides a high level of flexibility and convenience to students by offering online learning options for most their courses. This, as well as being awarded the 2016 Real Estate Business award for training and education, has helped to differentiate Harcourts from many of the other Australian real estate training providers.
Because of the Academy’s transition to an RTO and its increasing intake of students, it became apparent that the organisation needed a system to effectively manage and track their growing number of enrolments as well as meet their AVETMISS reporting requirements. Prior to this, Harcourts Academy had been using an internal custom-built student management system. However, when AVETMISS reporting became a mandatory requirement for all RTOs, Harcourts quickly discovered that making their internal system capable of producing the reports they required would be too time-consuming and expensive. Instead, the Harcourts Academy began looking for a student management system that would easily fulfil their RTO reporting and record management needs. This quest lead Harcourts to aXcelerate.
Solutions
When implementing aXcelerate, the biggest hurdle was to train and induct the regional support staff for the Harcourts Academy, especially considering that the organisation has six regional support offices in Australia. The aXcelerate team worked closely with Harcourts Academy to work out the best training delivery options. This included a mix of face to face and online training to accommodate regional office locations.
While fully implementing aXcelerate took a high level of coordination from both the Harcourts and aXcelerate team, once fully up and running Harcourts could use many of aXcelerate’s features to help with reporting and administrative tasks.
A key feature Harcourts Academy now utilises is the aXcelerate templates feature. Harcourts Academy created a standard template which is used to generate RTO compliant Statements of Attainment with custom Harcourts branding. Being able to create Statements of Attainment from a standard template has saved significant time for the Academy administrative team as they no longer create each new statement manually. The Harcourts Academy have also been using aXcelerate’s reporting tools to help effectively manage their AVTEMISS requirements. In particular, the aXcelerate report builder provides automated guidance when errors have been made by staff when they’re filling in student details. This has helped Harcourts to identify and resolve errors quickly, prior to sending the final reports to ASQA. This is a significant improvement as before aXcelerate, each RTO report had to be created manually by staff.
Finally, having a student management system that is cloud-based is a huge benefit to an international company like Harcourts, as any Academy staff member can easily access and track student data at any time, from anywhere.
Looking to the future
As the Harcourts Academy continue their partnership with aXcelerate, their focus will be on automating their administration and reporting processes. Now that they are comfortable with aXcelerate and understand its potential, they would like to take further advantage of features that help automate their day to day operations across all their regional offices. aXcelerate look forward to working closely with Harcourts Academy to create these automated workflows, which in turn will allow Harcourts Academy to focus more time and energy on what they do best; delivering quality real estate training.
To find out more about the Harcourts Academy and the training they offer visit their website.
