The Compliance Training Gorilla!

No matter what industry you’re in, there seems to be a growing requirement for compliancy training. New regulations from Government agencies, trade associations, and even vendors is making this type of training a requirement for practically everybody. Whether it’s training on hazardous materials, maintaining a respectful workplace or how to spot and avoid money laundering, we will all have to take a required course at some point in our lives. A recent survey from Brandon Hall found that nearly two thirds of the companies polled said over 75% of their employees are impacted by compliance training requirements. That’s a pretty big chunk of the workforce, and it is growing.

Compliancy training often involves a large audience, requires very precise and consistent messaging, and must be tracked. It is often required on a renewable basis. Clearly an online platform is the preferred way to manage this kind of training, so that it is available round the clock, regardless of location, and can be easily monitored to see who is in compliance and who isn’t. Because all of these factors contribute to the success of the employees and the organization, online training platforms make compliance courses much easier to manage than trying to do paper based or face to face training.

How does it work?

Cost

Old way: Training would be done face-to-face. Your company would hire a trainer or expert in their field, pay for their travel and have them go to each location to train everyone. If you have multiple locations, the trainer would either have to travel to each location or have to pay staff to travel where the training is taking place. If anyone misses the scheduled event you have to do it again. The costs quickly add up.

New way: With E-Learning the upfront development costs might be more than preparing a trainer to train your employees but this is a one-time cost, and the quality and consistency of the training can be assured by the subject matter experts. Once the course is developed your training costs go down exponentially, and your reach can include everyone. The ongoing cost to deploy and manage the structured training becomes nominal and you can divert trainers to more specialized training!

Consistency

Old way: Each trainer has a different way of teaching. When more than one trainer is involved content may be taught in different ways. Each may choose to focus on a different area of the training therefore there is no standardization of content. Results are highly subjective and can be manipulated or even not accurately reported.

New way: In an online course you have standardized content. You can seek the knowledge of the best Subject Matter Experts (SME’s), use a good instructional designer and build a course that covers all the compliancy topics. This results in consistent employee training no matter when or where they’re hired. Everyone is subject to the same measuring process. You can see patterns emerge that will identify weaknesses or areas of concern.

Timelines

Old way: Due to the costs of travel and schedules of trainers, face-to-face training is necessarily scheduled around resource availability, and therefore takes much longer. This means there are huge spaces in training times and will likely affect the ability to properly train people timely when they are hired. Sometimes you are paying people who cannot work productively because they are not in compliance yet.

New way: This limitation is completely removed in online training. Employees can take their training as soon as they are hired as part of their onboarding. Training can be scheduled to meet the new employee timelines, and not the trainers.  ELearning courses also tend to be more concise and shorter in duration than instructor led training so you can save time and money with each new employee too. A learner who needs longer to understand things can do so without tying up the trainer for the same period.

Accurate Reporting

The greatest reason to put your compliancy training online is so that you can accurately monitor completion and measure success. Online reports prove who has completed their training, and that they understand the concepts that relate to their job function. Properly designed assessments can measure and certify success.  The human error or bias factor is removed if a Learning Management System (LMS) is used.

Moving compliance training online has become a no brainer for many organizations because of the benefits it offers.  Compliance training is perhaps the low hanging fruit of the online training industry, and is most often the very first type of training that gets moved online in any organization.  It makes sense, and it is usually the easiest training to create online because the learning objectives and outcomes are clearly defined.   The investment is strategic.  It lowers long term costs, is scalable as the company grows, encourages employee engagement, standardizes the content and is an all-around flexible solution.

Of course, just because a compliance course is a requirement, it doesn’t mean you can make it boring or linear.  How can you ensure your compliance training program is engaging and effective? We’ll cover that in our next blog post!

Please comment and share your experiences with us!