How to Make Compliance Elearning Relevant to Actual Roles
There are plenty of existing compliance courses on the market that can be purchased and deployed within a matter of hours to all employees. Yet a general compliance course is most effective when it is tailored to what an employee does on a daily basis.
Audit What Each Role Actually Does
In fact, it is well known that a person’s job title often bears very little relation to what they actually do on a daily basis. Thus, the first step in developing effective eLearning is to describe what each role actually does on a day to day basis. Audit the tasks and decisions that employees in each role make on a daily basis and list the systems that they use. This basis of work provides a good starting point for the training needs analysis that is required to determine the content of the compliance eLearning.
Split Content Into Role-Based Tracks
To make the most out of your training efforts, rather than splitting modules into separate courses for each department, create separate tracks for customer-facing roles and back-office operations. The most critical portion of training for the frontline will be to learn to identify and escalate vulnerable customers, while those in the payments processing area of your company will want to learn to recognise unusual transaction patterns and how to flag them.
Use Real Situations, Not Industry Examples
Off-the-shelf e-learning content works best alongside scenarios from your own workplace. Include 2-3 real life scenarios that your staff have encountered recently and strip out any identifying features. The key is to make sure that the scenarios are close enough to the staff member’s own job that they can recognise the situations and apply the learning from the module to their own role.
Get Line Managers Involved in Module Choice
Managers know where their team members are struggling with particular topics. They can identify areas where team members lose interest and topics that feel less relevant to their work. When selecting optional modules for their team members, a manager who has experienced three near-misses with data handling within the last year would certainly identify topics related to data handling.
Replace Quizzes With Decision-Point Exercises
Instead of using quizzes to test for compliance understanding (which will simply assess the ability of a learner to recognise a definition of money laundering for example), use decision-point exercises which mimic the real-world application of the compliance training. For example, provide a scenario and ask the learner what they would do next. Offer a few plausible options and allow the learner to choose the most appropriate course of action. This will give a far better indication of whether the training has worked or not.
Ask For Feedback Straight After Completion
Use short prompts for feedback after the training has been completed. This can consist of three short questions which allow the user to comment on the relevance of the material to their job as well as any sections which were missing or irrelevant. Keep it short enough that the user will actually complete it – three to four questions at most. Use the feedback to strip out sections that no one feels adds value and also to identify any gaps that no one has previously commented on.
Retrain When The Role Changes, Not Just Annually
Many firms operate on an annual basis and thus ‘renew’ all their training on the same date each year. In the meantime a new member of staff may have been promoted within 3 months and not have the updated material for 9 months or more. Staff may have started working with new systems or products within a department but not have the relevant training assigned to them.
None of these points are particularly difficult to put into place and can, largely, be used to improve the worst-offending modules in your training program. Start with an audit, role-based tracks and a means of feedback. Once you’ve got a handle on what your staff are actually doing on a day to day basis, the rest follows.
