Digitalisation to gain efficiency and sustainability is increasing in all areas of the rail environment including railway signalling and safety systems. Here, cyber security is crucial for the smooth and secure running of railway operations. Even small interruptions may lead to delays and disruptions in transportation.

For this reason, employees in railway signalling and safety systems must be well trained and know how to ensure cyber security in their area. Siemens Mobility GmbH therefore decided to commission a web-based training course for these employees.

The discussion with the client showed that the target audience is very heterogeneous, as it includes different roles and areas of employment such as employees in control centres or security staff. However, there are also overlaps of things that all employees must keep in mind in order to protect the systems. For maximum impact of this web-based training, it is important that the entire target audience feels included.

Hence, it was our challenge to present the complex and technical topic in such a way that the broad target audience could identify with, while ensuring that the training is specific enough to add value. We achieved this with the help of our avatar, Selma. She already starred in the video on rail cyber security. She visits various employees of a railway company and asks them to describe and explain their tasks and challenges in terms of maintaining cyber security. This makes the plot easy to understand and, incidentally, the detailed illustrations also show the versatility of the employees, their jobs and work area.

To present complex content and misconduct we used an interactive digital board in Selma’s office. This trick allowed us to plausibly integrate text and animated diagrams with icons into the training without interrupting the narrative flow. The result was a coherent story with clear explanations, summaries, and interactions.

To reinforce the knowledge and to ensure its applicability – for example in the case of a hacker attack – we integrated case studies into the training and the final test.