Synergy Learning LMS platform developed for the United Nations Security Service

25 March 2025

United Nations Department for Safety and Security

Training higher quality UN bodyguards by utilising the power of online learning.

Smarter ways of sharing potentially life-saving training

The United Nations Department of Safety and Security (UNDSS) oversees the safety and security of the United Nations’ global operations. The department comprises around 10,000 security personnel who are responsible for protecting UN staff, premises and programmes in more than 130 countries worldwide.

Highest training standards

Security professionals working for UNDSS need the highest levels of training to perform their important — perhaps even life-saving — roles. While all employees need to complete the mandatory training that you would expect at the United Nations and any other large organisation, some learners go on to complete very advanced, highly-specific courses.

As such, UNDSS training output covers:

Onboarding

Smooth onboarding processes to introduce new security personnel to UNDSS and its processes.

Role-specific training

Specialised courses, such as close protection training for prospective bodyguards, psychological training on dealing with trauma, and physical security training.

We partnered with the UNDSS to deliver a customised Totara platform that would meet its requirements of delivering complex training in flexible ways, often in regions with varying levels of infrastructure and connectivity.

Simple solutions for complex courses

Following consultancy workshops to build our understanding of how the new platform could best serve UNDSS’ training needs, we set about creating a learning management system with all the flexibility and reliability needed to deliver training that can save lives.

Totara Learn provides the high levels of customisation needed. UNDSS takes full advantage of this flexibility by building increasingly sophisticated courses and adaptive learning content. These new courses — which would previously have been impossible for the UNDSS to create — provide far quicker and more effective ways of assessing security professionals across a wide range of specialisms.

Totara’s programs and certifications features make it straightforward to develop learning pathways covering each of these specialisms. This ensures security personnel are always assigned the right courses at the right time.

With Totara’s dynamic audiences, the UNDSS can easily identify a specific group of security personnel based on their roles, experience levels or assessment performances.

Together, these features make it simple to automatically enrol high-performing candidates for advanced training or new courses based on previous course completions or grades. More importantly, the LMS saves valuable time that was previously spent on manual admin processes.

Our better-than-bespoke LMS theme Spark provides an intuitive, user-friendly and UNDSS-branded learning environment to support all of this work.Having identified that a Totara Learn platform would best address the problems highlighted by the UNDSS and support its needs, we resolved each of the issues that were holding the academy back.

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Dramatically increasing female representation

UNDSS trainers say the new Totara LMS is producing a higher standard of close protection training candidates, which ultimately results in better close protection officers. The high-quality training delivered on the LMS is incredibly effective at highlighting those candidates with the best aptitude for close protection work.

This has considerable cost-saving benefits because only the best personnel progress from theory training on the LMS to more expensive practical training in which candidates will be firing guns and taking part in high-speed driving exercises.

Completing theory training on the site eliminates any bias about who might make a good close protection officer based on physical attributes. With better access to this pre-training, women now feel more confident in their abilities ahead of the in-person training. The result has been a significant increase in the number of female close protection officers.

Of all the suppliers who entered the procurement process, Synergy Learning was by far the best. The bid was completely on point and the information was clearly thought out and tailored to every aspect of our specifications. They seemed very good and incredibly knowledgeable.

Luis Pinheiro

Training Officer | United Nations Department of Safety and Security