The Unfortunate Reputation of Compliance Training and How to Tweak it

I came across an interesting article last week about compliance training and how to set it up in a more adaptive approach than most organizations are used to.

The Unfortunate Reputation of Compliance Training

Claire Anderson - Unsplash

As you might know, Compliance training, unfortunately, has a bad reputation: one more boring procedure that needs to be read and understood and signed off for completion. As such, compliance training is handled by most employees as another training checkbox that needs to be checked off. However, every company would benefit from compliance training done right. Of course, not only from the compliance perspective itself. If done right, more time to learn would become available, more time to absorb new topics and ideas relevant to the employees’ job and responsibilities.

To make compliance training more effective and efficient, the author of the article, Lyndon Lovell, states it should more closely rely on the learners’ prior knowledge:

“The concept of adaptive eLearning (adaptivity) refers to when a learner’s competency is assessed prior to pushing out the content to them. The content is consequently customized and delivered to them based on their pre-existing knowledge.”

As such the e-Learning will focus on the key areas for improvement, rather than on competencies a learner already possesses.  

How would this adaptive eLearning work?

Well, think about a scenario-based approach with alternative pathways, branching the content in multiple levels. Users only need to see the information they’d benefit from, reducing training time and engaging them even more.

Boba Jovanovic - Unsplash

For our customers, Arboth developed several of these adaptive compliance training items for ex. regarding the European Agreement concerning the International Carriage of Dangerous Goods by Road (ADR). Users were introduced into the content as if they would need to check their vehicle before takeoff and once done, what to do “en route”.

The users could navigate at their own pace through the content, choosing between the different topics. All information needed to be reviewed, but introducing the scenario, giving the users the tools to navigate freely and challenging them with some practical exercises in between had led to a more effective, engaging and less time consuming e-Learning module.

You could also think about new technology to help you “branch” the content: chatbots for ex. Chatbots and adaptive compliance training, a peculiar combination? I don’t think so!

Karen Philips