Engineering a High-Performance Compliance Culture at Skanska UK

Skanska UK is a leading construction and project development business with 138 years of heritage and more than 3,200 UK experts delivering some of Britain’s most critical infrastructure projects, from high-speed rail to defence facilities. Operating in a sector where safety, compliance and operational excellence are essential.

The Challenge

Beyond Simple Training

Skanska UK needed a digital learning infrastructure that could match their scale and ambition. Partnering with Cortexa, they replaced fragmented legacy systems with a cutting-edge Totara Learning Experience Platform (LXP) to drive organisational capability and operational excellence.

Before the “Learning Hub” was born, Skanska UK’s L&D landscape was a complex web of manual processes that posed significant operational risks:

• The “Data Silo” Risk: Compliance and training data were scattered across iTrent, legacy LMS platforms, and hundreds of project-level spreadsheets, making a single “”source of truth”” impossible.
• Invisible Progress: Line managers lacked the real-time visibility required to verify if their teams were site-ready, leading to administrative bottlenecks.
• Regulatory Complexity: With the introduction of the Building Safety Act 2022 and Construction (Design & Management) Regulations 2015, the legal burden to prove competency for specific “”Duty Holders”” became a high-stakes challenge that locally developed apps and spreadsheets could no longer sustain.
• Engagement Gaps: The lack of a centralised, social learning space meant that valuable peer-to-peer knowledge was being lost.

The Solution

A Future-Proof Digital Ecosystem

Cortexa collaborated with Skanska UK to architect a phased, high-impact rollout of their Learning Hub. This wasn’t just a software install; it was a strategic overhaul of how talent is nurtured and governed.

• A Brand-Immersive Experience: An intuitive, role-based UX designed to mirror Skanska UK’s high-performance brand, ensuring immediate user adoption.
• Precision “Duties Management”: Cortexa developed a bespoke system to manage the 50+ critical duty holders required for major projects, from Fire Wardens to BSA Accountable Persons. This allows project leads to search and verify qualified personnel in seconds.
• Automated Credentialing: A centralised vault for academic certificates, vocational accreditations, and professional memberships, featuring automated expiry alerts to eliminate compliance lapses.
• Scalable Competency Frameworks: Implementation of unlimited, multi-layered competency frameworks that allows Skanska UK to map proficiency levels against long-term business goals.
• Inclusion by Design: Integrated accessibility widgets (dyslexia fonts, contrast controls) ensured the platform was usable for every worker, from the head office to the construction site.

The Results

Setting a New Industry Gold Standard

The partnership with Cortexa has delivered measurable impact, moving Skanska UK from “reactive tracking” to “proactive talent management”:

• 100% Visibility: Total consolidation of learning routes into one mobile-responsive hub, providing leadership with real-time compliance dashboards.
• Operational Velocity: The Duties Management module now houses 7,000+ validated records, drastically reducing the time required to mobilise teams for new projects.
• Future-Ready Foundations: The platform is now the engine behind Skanska UK’s 2027Strategic Business Plan, facilitating complex onboarding and leadership pipelines that were previously impossible to manage at scale.

Key additional statistics, from April 2025 to April 2026.

• Site Access: A total of 3,775 period to date.
• Available Resources: 226 including micro learning courses and TED Talks with 90% of those already used with 4,637 views in total.
• Training Events: 29,213 course completions both internal and external. (Virtual & Face2Face) Nearly 8 pieces of learning per user who logged in.
• Certifications: 7,518 have been added
• The Future: Driving Strategic Growth

Having mastered the “Compliance Foundation,” Skanska UK and Cortexa are now evolving the platform into a competitive differentiator for 2026 and beyond:

• Hyper-Personalised Onboarding: Tailored paths for UK, Project, and Role-specific integration.
• Gamified Learning: Using engagement data and reporting to drive a culture of continuous self-improvement.
• Leadership Pipelines: Mapping competency achievement paths to identify and fast-track the next generation of leaders.