And while those in governmental organizations and regulatory bodies that put together the compliance rules your business needs to follow might be bureaucrats, they do not pull rules and recommendations out of thin air.
So, since you can’t avoid compliance training, and it’s probably best for your employees and your customers not to, how about making it more efficient and less taxing on your business’s operations?
In this post, we’ll have a look at the 4 major benefits of taking your corporate compliance training online. Beginning with…
1. Reduced costs
Traditional classroom-based courses, whether involving compliance training or not, are not cheap.
At the minimum, you’ll need some space to have them (and either multiple spaces or repeat uses of the same space, if your employees don’t fit in a single room, even worse if you have offices in different places). That’s space (or spaces) that you’ll need to rent or to repurpose from something else they could be used for.
Then there are the instructors. Someone will need to create this compliance learning material, teach and explain it to your employees, prepare and evaluate tests and generally do all that jazz, right?
Sure, you could just give your employees some state-created compliance manual and have them go through it themselves, but don’t expect much from such an approach. There’s a reason schools don’t just give kids some books and have them learn by themselves — and the same reason holds for adult learning.
Online regulatory compliance training allows you to serve your compliance eLearning courses to anything from a couple to a couple hundred thousand employees — even if they work in several different departments, facilities, cities, countries, and time zones. And all that from a single installation and without classroom costs — heck, you don’t even need a whiteboard.
2. Flexible learning pace
Another place where online compliance training shines is the convenience it offers to your employees — convenience that translates to great benefits for your business too.
See, the key thing about online training (compliance or not) is that it is asynchronous. That’s fancy tech-speak for “can happen at the trainee’s own time”.
Even more so, as online compliance training doesn’t require that your employees physically meet in a classroom at some predetermined time, it can also happen at their own place of choice too. As long as they have a desktop or laptop PC, a tablet, or a smartphone, they are perfectly capable of participating in your online compliance training courses from anywhere they are, at any time they want.
That’s good for your employees, as it gives them the power to optimize their training and schedule it as they see fit, but also eliminates business downtime. With online training, your employees don’t have to stop their work in bunches and go attend some compliance training seminar.
3. Reporting and Monitoring
Another time-consuming aspect of traditional classroom-based compliance training is keeping track of your learners’ progress. Grading test results alone can take hours or days when it involves dozens or even hundreds of employees. And you can just about forget about tracking their progress mid-course.
With online training, on the other hand, and a powerful Talent Development Platform, like eFront, progress tracking comes for free, is automatic and is on 24/7.
eFront administrators and instructors can check the learner’s progress at any time, get an overall picture (regarding grades, attendance, certificates awarded, etc.), or focus on specific employee groups, and, of course, individual employees.
In eFront, for example, this is handled by its powerful and flexible Reports engine, that offers ready-made reports for all kinds of system entities and activities — complete with pretty graphs and numerous filters to narrow down the available information to just what you want to see. You can even export the report data in an Excel-compatible file format, for further processing and study.
And when a user has completed their compliance training on some subject, eFront gives you the option to certify that knowledge (at least internally in the company) by awarding a Certification. This is probably all that’s needed for company-mandated compliance training programs, but it’s also a good way to keep track of which users have completed their industry-and law-mandated compliance training.
With online talent development and training platforms, you can also have certificates be awarded automatically upon the completion of a course (or a set of courses), and even create certificates that auto-expire, for those cases and industries where the law requires periodic re-training for a professional to keep their license.
And if you manage your certifications online, you can also revoke them online (e.g. in case an employee violates certain compliance guidelines), and have it automatically show in the employee’s online profile.
4. Reusability
We’ve mentioned some of the ways online training results in significant cost savings in the beginning of this post, but there are lots of other cost-and time-saving benefits from online training too that we haven’t touched upon.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of this is the reusability you get from online training material.
It’s not just that you can reuse the same material for several groups of learners and across several years — after all, you could also do that with printed training lecture notes (although for those, you’d have to photocopy them for each new class).
Rather, the biggest benefit online training content has when it comes to reusability is its malleability — you can easily clone it, adapt it for different audiences, share it with different groups of learners, fix mistakes, add or remove material as needed, and generally, create tons of different versions of a course (for beginners and advanced users, for company employees and for extended enterprise partners, for desktop learning and for microlearning, and whatever else you need) with ease.
Depending on your eLearning platform, it gets even better.
eFront, for example, allows instructors to create a pool of 10s or 100s of questions which it can then use to automatically create new tests (and even randomize them). This means that after some initial effort to come up with the questions, instructors can create new tests of any size and depth with just a few clicks. Ηow’s that for re-usability?
Oh, and what’s the opposite of re-usability? I’m not exactly sure what’s the right term, but if you need it, eFront supports it. By which I mean that you can serve different material to different groups of employees, and even cater to remote teams in other facilities, cities or even countries, through dedicated and independent talent development and training portals (called “Branches” in eFront) that are managed through a single eFront installation.
Conclusion
Moving your corporate compliance training online, to your corporate intranet or a privately managed Cloud server, has many benefits over traditional classroom-based training seminars.
These benefits, from reduced costs to fewer workflow interruptions and more freedom for your employees, make investing in online compliance training solution an easy choice, whether you are an SME with a couple of dozens of employees or a large multinational.
