The Compliance Bugaboo!

Compliance training elicits about as much enthusiasm as a parallel parking contest.  So what’s compliance training and why do we need it?  Well, government regulations and business best practices dictate that you conduct certain courses and maintain records to show that they have been taken and understood by all with the need to know.  Not offering such training can jeopardize the health and safety of your workers and/or get you on the wrong side of the law.

Here are some examples of such Training:

• Human resource issues such as equal opportunity, workforce diversity, and sexual harassment.
• Business ethics:  General business ethics as well as the specialized needs of those involved with accounting/finance, information technology, record retention, and corporate governance.
• Health and safety standards of the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
• Industrial safety:  Such as preventing accidents, fires, and chemical spills.
• Driving safety education:  For those who operate vehicles that are part of corporate fleets.
• HIPAA training:  For healthcare workers on how to use and share patient information in accordance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA).

What’s the ideal platform for such training?  To answer that question, we need to examine the characteristics of compliance training.  It’s required by large numbers of people, often within a short timeframe, and is often repetitive.  And, of course, it demands good record keeping.  E-learning has the ability to perform volume training quickly and cost effectively, even when there are one or two participants per location.  It’s also just-in-time and self-paced, allowing it to be more easily squeezed into a crowded schedule.  All that makes e-learning the ideal vehicle for compliance training.  What about the records?  When e-learning is delivered from an LMS, record-keeping is automatic and effortless!

Now, what’s this LMS?  A Learning Management System is software that allows you to catalog all of your training offerings, whether instructor-led or self-paced, as well as track the progress of everyone taking these courses – anywhere at any time in your company.  LMSs, while quite useful, don’t come cheap.  They can be pricey, ranging in cost from many thousands to millions of dollars, and can be hard to select, customize, install, and operate. 

Does it ever make sense to offer instructor-led training (ILT) classes on compliance issues?  There’s no better training than an ILT class taught well!  There are topics related to people issues, for instance cultural diversity and sexual harassment, that can be taught with much greater impact in an ILT setting. 

So how do you implement compliance e-learning and an LMS without going broke?  Eogogics offers online course libraries for most of the compliance training needs.  We also offer high-impact ILT courses on sensitive compliance issues along with knowledgeable blended learning consultants who can help put it all together into packages that score high on the quality/effectiveness scale but are easy on your budget.  By the way, our e-learning courses are the same as those sold by well-known e-learning companies.  We just sell them for less.  Another bonus:  All of our e-learning libraries come with a built-in LMS – FREE!  What more could you ask for?  Give us a call, so we can help you get a compliance training program going in your company without delay.