At last year’s Learning Technologies Awards, Mindtools and South Western Railway won Gold in the ‘Best use of blended learning – commercial sector’ category.

In this week’s episode of The Mindtools L&D Podcast for 2025, Ross D and Claire are joined by Becky Eason, Leadership Delivery Manager at South Western Railway, to discuss:

The context in which the program was developed, and the problems it was designed to solve;

How we used focus groups, semi-structured interviews, and a valid and reliable behavioral survey to test assumptions and prove impact;

The results of the program and the changes we've made to it in response to evaluation of the pilot.

In ‘What I Learned This Week’, Claire gave her seal of approval to Wicked, Becky recommended the Netflix series La Palma, and Ross D wondered why he doesn’t listen to the Song Exploder podcast more often.

For more from us, visit mindtools.com.

There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work.  

Connect with our speakers   

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn:

Ross Dickie

Claire Gibson

Becky Eason

427 — Designing an award-winning blended learning programme

The Mindtools L&D Podcast