Since its inception, BCcampus has been supporting a key system used by many of the 30,000 B.C. government employees: the Course Information & Registration System (CIRS). Originally developed by BCcampus staff in 2003, CIRS became immediately popular as the convenient way for government employees to find and register in government sponsored employee training and development courses.

During the 8 years that BCcampus has maintained the system and provided direct support to all its users, it’s estimated that there have been approximately 200,000 course registrations processed by the system. Use has grown from just over 20,000 course registrations in 2003/04, to over 35,000 registrations in 2007/8, to 6,600 in the single month of October 2010.

The direct user support provided by the BCcampus helpdesk has also been significant, with over 50,000 calls logged over the time we’ve been supporting the system. For the first 4 years, support was provided via e-mail and a toll-free phone line, with about a 70:30 split in requests. More recently, calls have been handled exclusively via e-mail, and this proved quite effective.

The system itself was developed in partnership with the Public Service Agency, which has been responsible for supporting employee development throughout government. The key business process change which they were able to make that led to the popularity of CIRS was replacing a multi-part paper pre-approval registration form, which required the signature of each employee’s supervisor, with the online registration capability that simply e-mailed the employee’s supervisor with notice of the course registration, putting the onus on employees to discuss their training/development needs with their supervisors before registering in courses. Waitlisting functions were included to ensure courses were optimally filled to capacity (more recently, a significant addition of many online self-paced courses has opened up many additional training opportunities).

“Thank you for eight years of wonderful customer service responding to thousands of requests from course participants.” Steve Bachop, Director – Learning Centre, BC Public Service Agency

We’ve enjoyed running this service too! As of April 1, 2011, the BC Public Service Agency has taken over full responsibility for supporting CIRS.