Onboarding and competency training
Teach the knowledge. Prove it in the field.
Onboarding, orientation and competency programs for complex, process driven operations, built from your own drawings, manuals and procedures. People learn online, then supervisors validate each skill on the job with field level assessments recorded in our Training Management System. Built by a small senior team in New Brunswick and Alberta, delivered anywhere.
Field level assessment, on site. A supervisor verifies the task in the field and the record lands in the worker’s file, right next to their online test results.
1,000+
competency training modules developed and delivered since 2007
Since 2007
building competency programs for energy, power generation, mining and manufacturing operations
Coast to coast
industry training adopted by post secondary institutions across Canada
Operators first
writers who were process operators, commissioning specialists and engineers
Why it works
We turn process drawings into process actions people can see.
A procedure on paper tells a worker what to do. A Contendo module starts at the drawing they already know, opens the equipment up and runs it, so they understand the mechanism instead of memorising the step. A field level assessment then confirms they can do it for real.
01 The drawing they know
The process or equipment schematic, tagged exactly as it appears in your own documentation.
02 Opened up
The equipment in section, with internals, levels and flows made visible while it runs.
03 Down to the mechanism
The component that makes it work, and why it behaves the way it does when conditions change.
Every module ends the same way: stated learning objectives, a downloadable worksheet, review sections and an online test that records itself. Then the knowledge goes to the field, where a supervisor validates it on the actual equipment and signs it off in the TMS. Our writers are former process operators, commissioning specialists, engineers and technologists, so the content is technically right the first time.
Amazingly intuitive features for industrial clients without the heavy and complex operations so common with institution based learning solutions.
Don Whitty, VP of Training, Calian Group
Flagship service
Onboarding and competency, validated where the work happens.
Every program starts from your operation, not a template. Your drawings and procedures become animated, testable modules for onboarding and upskilling, and each one can pair with a field level assessment so supervisors confirm the skill on the job. Knowledge taught, then proven, with the record to show for it.
- Onboarding programs that get new hires productive sooner
- Operator and technician competency, from a single skid to a full facility
- Field level assessments, validated on site and recorded in the TMS
- Site orientations and security awareness, built on your own procedures
- Technical writing: procedures, practices, control narratives
Workflow and software development
Automation works on a workflow somebody has actually mapped.
We have been building systems that take work off people since 2007. Timesheets that follow crews to the field. Work orders and change requests that route themselves. Training records that keep themselves. Quality checks that prove they happened. The software was never really the point. Understanding the work well enough to redesign it was.
That is why so much AI is landing badly right now. A tool dropped onto a process nobody has written down automates the confusion and adds a subscription. The gains people were promised need a defined workflow underneath them, and most companies do not have one written anywhere.
So we work in that order. Map the work, build the system that carries it, then augment it with AI where that genuinely serves what you are trying to achieve. Where it does not, we leave it alone. We are not interested in driving square pegs into round holes, and you should not be paying for the privilege.
A work request system we built. Paper forms replaced by something crews fill in from the field and supervisors approve.
01
Map the work
How the job actually moves, including the parts that only live in somebody’s head. Nothing gets automated before it is understood.
02
Build the system
The tool that carries the workflow, on the web, on a phone in the field, sized and priced for a company like yours.
03
Augment where it fits
AI applied to the steps that genuinely benefit: drafting, extraction, classification, the pile of documents nobody has time to read. Matched to your goals, and nowhere else.
Off the shelf course library
SAGD Oil Sands Online, still sold and still supported.
Running a SAGD operation? Our ready made library covers a complete facility: four courses and over eighty animated modules from the well pad to the steam generators, each with testing that certifies itself.
Single modules from $39.95, full courses or corporate licensing, delivered through our TMS or your own. The free demo module shows you the format first.
COURSE 01 · 14 MODULES
Well Pads
Reservoir, well design, well pair controls, steam traps, lift gas, separators, well testing.
COURSE 02 · 27 MODULES
Bitumen Processing
Emulsions and diluent, separation and treating, flash gas, sales oil, LACT, flare, vapour recovery.
COURSE 03 · 12 MODULES
Produced Water De Oiling
Cooling, skim tank, skim oil handling, de oiling polymer, induced gas flotation, oil removal filters.
COURSE 04 · 24 MODULES
Water Treatment
Make up water, lime softening, ion exchange, WAC, boiler feed water, steam generation and OTSGs.
Built here, now its own company
Arbiter Completions
The mechanical completions and commissioning platform started as a Contendo build for a client who needed check sheets off paper and into something their whole project could see. It outgrew us. Arbiter is now its own company with its own team, and clients who need completions management go straight there.
Tell us about the operation, the people and the gap.
A 30 minute call is enough to scope most programs. No deck, no pressure, just a conversation about what your operation needs people to know.