City & Guilds Walled Garden has been redesigned to give radically improved transparency and simplicity to the thousands of administrators registering candidates and accessing course information online

Managing the volume of orders City & Guilds receives from its many thousands of centres, on behalf of millions of candidates across the world, has never been an easy task. While City & Guilds enjoys high levels of brand awareness around the globe, few individuals truly realise the complexities involved in accurately capturing and processing so many transactions.

Just over 10 years ago, City & Guilds showed the way forward by being the world’s first leading awarding body to launch an online administration tool for its centres. The system, known as the Walled Garden, allows exam administrators to save time and paper by placing their orders online. Since then, other awarding bodies have followed this lead and also launched their own online systems.

Now, City & Guilds is launching an entirely new Walled Garden system, based on a single, integrated system called SAP. The system brings numerous benefits to its customers, as well as providing a platform that allows City & Guilds to continue providing technological and service leadership.
City & Guilds has taken the management of this change very seriously indeed. Employees across the organisation have received in-depth training to fully support the new system prior to its launch. Throughout the new Walled Garden’s development, City & Guilds has worked closely with customers through focus groups and other feedback sessions, to create a system that fulfils customer needs.

The new Walled Garden has been tested by 110 pilot centres whose progress has been followed closely. Their feedback has been positive, helping refine the Walled Garden before its gradual release to all remaining centres around the world.

Launching a system like this is not as simple as pushing a button. Teaching some 19,000 Walled Garden account holders how to use the new Walled Garden provides an enormous challenge. Given such a large user base, it is impossible to provide one-on-one training to everyone. To deal with this training challenge, an online tutorial has been developed allowing centres to learn how to use the new Walled Garden from their own offices, as and when it suits them.

The use of such computer-based training technology has never before been seen on this scale in the sector. The online tutorials are designed to offer demonstrations and interactive learning sessions, allowing users to spend as long as they like adjusting to the new Walled Garden before using it for real.

In addition to the new Walled Garden, City & Guilds has taken this change opportunity to introduce new, clearer ways of sending out printed information, as well as simplifying its traditional order processes. A communications programme has been put in place to let customers know when these changes will be implemented.

The platform upon which the new Walled Garden is based will allow City & Guilds to remain flexible to changing customer needs over the next 10 years… and beyond.

Find out more about the changes happening to the Walled Garden >