The forgotten majority
Corporate communication is built around an assumption: everybody has a computer and an email address. In industry that assumption holds for a minority.
Engineers, operators, installers and contractors generally have no company laptop, often no company email, and sometimes no personnel number in the system. What they do have is a phone in their pocket. That is not the second channel, it is the only one that works.
Why it often goes wrong
Organisations that recognise this usually come unstuck on the same three things afterwards.
The installation. An app gets built that has to come from the app store. That means creating an account, waiting for IT approval, owning a handset new enough to run it. With your own staff that just about works; with contractors who will be somewhere else next week, it does not.
The device. The phone is private property. Asking somebody to install something that wants access to all sorts of things meets justified resistance, and legally it is more sensitive than people assume.
The content. An existing course gets made mobile instead of something being made that belongs on a phone. Twenty screens of text at six inches is read by nobody, even when it technically works.
Not an app, but a web app
The practical answer to the first two is a progressive web app: an application that runs in the browser, can be added to the home screen, works offline and synchronises later.
No app store, no installation, no access to the rest of the device. Somebody gets a link, opens it, and is in. For a contractor who starts on Monday and is gone again in three weeks, that is the difference between reaching them and not.
Working offline is not an optional extra here. In a basement, a tank, a shaft or at sea there is no network, and those are precisely the places where somebody needs an instruction.
What belongs in it and what does not
A learning app on the floor is not a course platform. It is there to do three things.
Look things up. The operation somebody performs twice a year, with the steps in the right order and imagery of the real equipment. This is by far the most used function and at the same time the least often built.
Record things. A check that was carried out, a deviation that was seen, an induction that was completed. Captured at the moment itself, not in the evening on a form.
Short repetition. A unit of five minutes tied to what is live this week.
What does not belong in it: long modules, extensive assessment, anything that demands an uninterrupted half hour. That is better placed elsewhere, and the urge to cram everything into one app is the fastest way to make sure it stops being used.
The yardstick is simple: if somebody wearing work gloves, standing up, in poor light, finds what they are looking for within twenty seconds, it works. If not, it is a course platform with a mobile shell.
An app is one format among others, and rarely the only one you need. Which format suits which learning objective is in the guide on setting up or renewing a corporate academy. What such an app involves technically is under learning apps.