How the City of Albuquerque trains 1,300+ seasonal workers and volunteers a year with Teachable

Tom Darling walked into the City of Albuquerque's HR department in 2016 with one task: build an employee training program for 6,000 city workers.

He already knew which platform he was going to use.

Tom had been a Teachable creator since around 2014 or 2015, running online courses through his personal coaching and consulting business. When he became the associate director of HR and took over the Employee Learning Center, he saw no reason to look elsewhere. Teachable was affordable, easy to use, and he could have courses live within days.

That was 10 years ago.

Today, Tom's team runs a three-platform training operation covering everything from mandatory HR compliance courses for full-time city staff to onboarding programs for roughly 900 summer seasonal workers who show up every June without a city email address. Teachable sits at the center of the piece that formal enterprise systems simply cannot reach.

"I feel like I've cheated a little bit, because I'm using Teachable in a way that it wasn't necessarily designed for. But it works. And I think if more people could see how they could use this tool this way, they would be able to accomplish a lot." —Tom Darling, Associate Director of HR, City of Albuquerque

The City of Albuquerque Teachable journey at a glance

The problem with enterprise LMS platforms

Before Tom arrived, the city had a barely functional Moodle setup. The police department ran its own separate training system through PowerDMS. Tom scrapped Moodle on day one.

A few years in, the city adopted PeopleSoft ELM as its enterprise record repository. It was supposed to handle everything. In practice, PeopleSoft's learning module requires SCORM-compliant content to work, and the city has never been able to get that integration functioning reliably. PeopleSoft ELM also requires VPN access, which means a bus driver or patrol officer trying to complete a mandatory course on their phone during downtime runs into a security wall.

The city also brought on Knowledge City, a licensed LMS with a database of roughly 15,000–18,000 pre-built courses covering leadership, technology, and compliance. At approximately $11 per employee per year across 6,000 staff, Knowledge City runs the city about $67,000 annually. It works well for registered employees with city email accounts and employee ID numbers.

For everyone else, it falls apart.

Summer seasonal workers arrive in June without Microsoft accounts. Volunteers at animal shelters, homeless services, and the zoo have no city credentials. Boards, commissions, and committees connected to city council need training but never formally enter the city's records system. None of them can use Knowledge City.

That's where Teachable fills the gap.

"In a perfect world I would love to have one LMS that did everything, that we could pay one time for. Unfortunately, that's not the way the world works." — Tom Darling, Associate Director of HR, City of Albuquerque

How the City of Albuquerque uses Teachable

Will Wheeler, the team's organizational learning analyst, handles most of the digital content production and manages Teachable day to day. The question he asks before building any new piece of content is always the same: who's the audience?

The answer determines everything. Full-time and part-time employees with city accounts go into Knowledge City. Everyone else goes into Teachable.

That 'everyone else' covers a lot of ground:

• Summer seasonal workers: Every year, roughly 900 people arrive for summer positions in parks and recreation, youth and family services, and other departments. They need the same onboarding content as permanent employees but have no city login. Tom's team packages that content in Teachable, sends out a URL, and workers create an account with their personal email.

• Volunteers: Animal welfare is the city's largest Teachable user group. Almost the entire volunteer corps at the city's animal shelters runs through Teachable. Will also produces training for volunteers in environmental health, spill prevention (SWIP and SPCC), and the city's homeless services division.

• Boards, commissions, and committees: Groups connected to city council need mandatory training without access to internal systems. Teachable handles those enrollments without any IT involvement.

• Leadership development cohorts: The city runs a year-long Pre-Management Development Program for 25 employees each cycle, meeting every Thursday for a year. Teachable serves as the content repository and collaboration space. Participants log in throughout the week, access course materials, and comment on each other's work. The city also runs five cohorts per year of the Supervisory Development Program, an eight-week requirement for newly promoted managers (20–25 people per cohort). A new apprenticeship program launching soon will use Teachable as the two-year record repository for employees shadowing senior staff.

"Not only are we using it for that larger group, it's also a nice tool for small learning communities within the city. We wouldn't use Knowledge City for that because there's no way for people to interact with each other." —Tom Darling, Associate Director of HR, City of Albuquerque

The City of Albuquerque’s strategies for running government training on a budget

Tom has spent 10 years refining what works. He's also shared his approach with four other New Mexico municipalities dealing with the same problem. Here's what he tells them.

Strategy 1: Match the platform to the audience, not the other way around

Most organizations try to find one system that handles everything. Tom's team stopped chasing that. Knowledge City handles career development for registered employees. PeopleSoft ELM maintains the official training records. Teachable serves everyone the other two platforms cannot reach.

The result is a three-platform operation that Tom and Will manage without a large team. Each platform does one job well.

Take action: Before evaluating any new LMS, map your learner types. Who has accounts in your system? Who does not? The platforms serving your credentialed employees likely cannot serve your volunteers, seasonal staff, or external partners. A separate, lower-cost platform for those populations may be more defensible than forcing one enterprise solution to handle everyone. Explore Teachable's plans or get in touch with the Teachable team today to find an option that fits.

Strategy 2: Prioritize access over complexity

The most important outcome Tom described is simple: when someone logs in to take a course, the course works. No VPN required. No IT ticket to open an account. No multi-step security wall before a seasonal worker can watch an onboarding video.

Tom's team can have a new course live in Teachable within a day. They send a URL, and anyone anywhere can register and start using Teachable’s mobile apps. For a bus driver completing mandatory training on a lunch break, or a volunteer showing up to an animal shelter orientation, that frictionless access matters more than any advanced feature.

"The most important experience for the user is that every single time you're assigned a course, when you log into that course, the course works, you can hear it, you can access the content, you can complete it, and you can get your certificate." —Tom Darling, Associate Director of HR, City of Albuquerque

Take action: Audit your current training delivery from the perspective of your lowest-tech user. Walk through the exact steps someone with no company account, using a personal phone, would need to take to access a required course. Every friction point is a completion risk. Teachable's course compliance tools let you enforce lesson order and video completion without adding login complexity.

Strategy 3: Use the leaderboard to manage compliance, not just track it

Will inherited a manual process. When a department needed confirmation that employees had completed required training, he checked each record individually, every day, until completions appeared.

Teachable's reporting changed that. Will can now see exactly who has logged in, how far they've progressed, and when the last activity occurred. For programs involving minors, like the summer seasonal workers who may be 16-year-olds in their first job, that oversight matters. Supervisors get regular completion updates. Departments can verify that the people they sent through training actually finished.

"That leaderboard has been a lifesaver for us. We can pull so much data out of that and see exactly what happened when. That's been a real big improvement." —Will Wheeler, Organizational Learning Analyst, City of Albuquerque

Take action: Set a weekly appointment to review student progress reports on your most compliance-critical courses. Build a simple reporting template so you can send department managers a one-page completion status update without digging through raw data each time.

Strategy 4: Build the cost case for leadership

When Tom recommends Teachable to smaller municipalities, he makes a specific argument. A city with 500 employees and 50 courses can run its entire custom training program for a fraction of the cost of other enterprise systems.

The content creation work exists either way. What changes is where you host it and what you pay.

"For a couple grand a year, you can buy access to a platform that will allow you to put all your stuff online. The hardest part of all this is finding somebody who can develop digital content for you." —Tom Darling, Associate Director of HR, City of Albuquerque

Take action: Build a simple cost comparison for your leadership. Line up your current per-seat LMS costs against the number of non-employee, temporary, or volunteer users you need to train annually. If that group is significant, a second, lower-cost platform may be the more defensible budget decision. Contact Teachable's sales team if you need a custom setup.

Looking ahead

Tom has been watching the budget pressure on Knowledge City's $67,000 annual license for years. His contingency plan has always been the same: if the city stops paying for Knowledge City, everything moves back to Teachable.

That's not a crisis. Tom's team has built the content, knows the platform, and has a decade of workflow built around it. The flexibility to absorb a major platform change without rebuilding from scratch is itself part of Teachable's value.

The new apprenticeship program launching this year will be the city's most complex Teachable use case yet. Individual employees will track their own two-year development journey, uploading weekly reflections, working through assigned content, and documenting progress toward eventual supervisory credit. No equivalent exists in any of the city's enterprise systems.

New Mexico municipalities still call Tom for advice. His answer has not changed much in 10 years.

"Teachable is kind of the pinch hitter for us. When something doesn't work with the other platforms we have, Teachable always ends up being where we move it, and we know we can have that course delivered to those people next week." —Tom Darling, Associate Director of HR, City of Albuquerque

What to do next

Explore Teachable for your organization:  If your workforce includes volunteers, seasonal staff, contractors, board members, or anyone without an account in your primary system, Teachable's no-VPN access and simple enrollment model may solve a problem you've been working around for years. 

Browse Teachable's plans here.

Talk to our team: Organizations with more complex training needs can contact the Teachable sales team to explore a setup that fits.