Master Builders Association of NSW case study

Streamlining course enrolment for Master Builders

For 150 years, Master Builders Association of New South Wales (Master Builders) has been the leading industry body for building and construction in NSW. The association boasts 8,000+ member companies across three sectors of the industry – residential, commercial, and engineering/civil construction.

Master Builders’ Education and Skills Development provides training and certification as a Registered Training Organisation, accredited by the Australian Skills Quality Authority. Through education pathways, Master Builders provides meaningful, long term career development to builders, tradespeople, and apprentices. 

The challenge

Creating a fit-for-purpose solution

Master Builders Education and Skills Development Department is part of the Education and Apprenticeships business unit within the Association. It has a distinct and unique audience that sets it apart from other departments within Master Builders, and approximately 95% of their students are not yet Master Builders Association members. A new platform was desired for an audience with little knowledge of Master Builders courses and qualifications, and one that was in keeping with the association’s overarching brand and reputation. 

Master Builders identified a need to create a standalone website to showcase the vocational education qualifications and courses available to potential students and to automate enrolments online. As the existing path to purchase courses was long and unintuitive, as well as restrictive, functionality across the website needed improvement to meet the needs of students, businesses, and the Education and Skills Development team themselves. Buyers needed to be able to bundle purchases and navigate quickly through the sale process. Master Builders needed greater flexibility and control over their content.

For a specific subset of courses, the historic manual processing of enrolment applications was a labour-intensive administrative burden, creating a pressurised environment for Master Builders staff and limiting the ability to scale. Additionally, with many potential students being non-technical, it was important to create a solution that was easy for anyone to use. Master Builders was also working to a tight deadline, with dependent licensing expiring.

Master Builders Key Operational Drivers 

• Create a standalone brand for the Education and Skills Development department.
• Improve functionality limited by the existing Master Builders Association website.
• Automate manual processes like enrolment and payment.
• Allow bundling of courses.

An end-to-end solution

An end-to-end solution was pitched to Master Builders, featuring research, UX, design, development, integrations, hosting, and support.

Sitback conducted extensive user and Service Design research to inform the website wireframes, that were then iterated on through collaboration between Sitback and Master Builders stakeholders.

The build leveraged WordPress due to its ease of use for content moderators, and was integrated with Salesforce, Wisenet, Moodle, Payway and MailChimp via APIs to seamlessly automate processes. Extensive custom development enabled complex multi-user course enrolment workflows, perfect for businesses purchasing training for multiple members of staff simultaneously.

The solution was designed to be user-friendly for Master Builders admins, with templates and shortcodes to simplify publishing courses. An iterative process played an essential role in ensuring the success of the project, with both teams contributing to the project constructively. Tight timelines were met to complete the build before dependent licensing ended, and the project closed on time and on budget. With a completely novel website now live, Sitback and Master Builders continue to enjoy working together to further optimise the site through analytics and data-led experiments.

Overall, the project delivered significant value to Master Builders and Sitback, thanks to a consultative approach built on mutual respect, technical expertise across both teams, a focus on stakeholder collaboration, and the fostering of interpersonal relationships that brought joy in even the most unexpected places. The result is an intuitive platform we are all incredibly proud of that unlocks a previously stifled range of courses and empowers Master Builders to achieve their goals.

“The people-focused culture at Sitback was evident and I knew this was key to the success of this project.  Sitback were laser-focused on solving our course enrolment problems, adapting technology to our audience, and building a collaborative team.”

Melissa Cassar

Marketing and Communications Coordinator – Master Builders Education and Apprenticeships

The results

The foundation is now in place to focus on improving marketing and promotion of the education Master Builders offers based on data-driven insights. Through the website, the marketing team has better visibility into analytics and performance data that will drive the optimisation of their efforts. This improvement benefits students directly, helping them find, apply, and pay for courses faster. The enhanced technology also allows the team to feel confident in their abilities and take more ownership over optimising the student experience.

A key goal for Master Builders was to achieve automation of manual processes, enabling scalability without overwhelming staff. Ecommerce courses can now be sold at any time, to anyone, without human intervention, improving profitability and reducing workload. Customers can bundle multiple courses in one cart, a major benefit for businesses purchasing for their teams. Crucially, the enrolment process was streamlined from a cumbersome 11 pages down to 3-5 pages.

Master Builders has seen benefits such as increased online course enrolments, reduced manual processing, a refreshed modern site, and simplified workflows. In addition, the enrolment process is now much more streamlined for students, reducing barriers to their education. The future is bright for Master Builders students, with the team at Master Builders focused on improving marketing and promotion based on the insights from analytics available from the new site. This focus empowers students to find the right course, at the right time, and advance their career in the construction industry.

“I cannot speak more highly of the Sitback team. From the very start of our project/s, the conscious thought and the customer centric approach was always at the forefront. The team made our projects much lower stress than it usually would be, and the technical prowess and personal management and relationship development is something you do not always see.”

Darin Grace

Operations Manager, Education and Apprenticeships