The fastest, easiest way to create online compliance training

The very mention of mandatory annual compliance training on topics like health and safety, harassment, or data privacy and security can make employees’ eyes glaze over and send HR teams into a panic. 

It’s not just that compliance training topics are dull for learners and course creators. It’s also that compliance training is stressful. It’s a high-profile, heavy-lift endeavor necessary for doing business—whether you or your learners like it or not. 

Delivering annual compliance training is a business necessity; it’s the legally mandated way your company demonstrates its compliance with the law. More than that, compliance training makes good business sense. After all, regularly raising employee awareness of laws and procedures governing their conduct can help your company minimize risk and avoid costly lawsuits. 

For something so important, you’d think compliance training would be lavished with a generous budget and training resources. Unfortunately, that’s not usually the case. According to the 2019 Training Industry Report, most organizations only allocate about $500K of their multimillion-dollar annual training budget for compliance training—a small fraction of the amount spent on other business-critical training topics. 

That means you and your team are likely facing the daunting task of creating and delivering legally required training on boring material learners don’t enjoy—AND you have to do it on a shoestring budget, under a strict deadline. It’s not hard to see why compliance training is so dreaded.

Thankfully, there’s a simple, cost-effective, and lower-stress way to create and deliver online compliance training to employees. 

In this article, we’ll show you the fastest and easiest way to create and deliver online compliance training using Rise, the all-in-one training system you and your employees will love. We’ll also explain how to use Rise to manage your online compliance training, assign it to learners, and track and report your results. 

Creating online compliance training 

When training pros create online training on any topic, they follow a few simple steps: 

1. First, they pin down the goal of training (what the training needs to accomplish)
2. Then, they gather and prioritize source content against those training goals
3. Finally, they create their online training in some kind of course development app 

Let’s explore each of these steps, focusing on the special needs that go along with creating online compliance training.

Pin down the goal of training

To be effective, online training should have a clear goal—like improving employee performance, reducing operator errors, or increasing sales revenue. These are all examples of training goals—or what your online training needs to accomplish.

But unlike other types of training, the goals of compliance training are to increase employee awareness of applicable laws and demonstrate your company’s compliance with those laws. As you’ll see in the next step, it’s important to keep these goals in mind right from the start, so the training you create feels relevant to your learners.

Gather and prioritize source content

Training source material can take many forms, but most often, it’s PowerPoint slides and Word documents.

For compliance training, it’s also helpful to get input from your company’s legal or compliance departments, other business leaders, and people managers. These people often have information or resources, like policies and procedures manuals, case studies, and legal code you need to know.

Whatever form the source material takes, the next thing to do is revisit your goals. As you review each piece of content, ask yourself, “Do learners really need to know this to hit the training goals?” If it can help learners achieve the goals, make sure to include it in your online training. If not, set it aside or turn it into optional reference material. 

With something as critical as compliance training, it’s tempting to err on the side of caution and include every possible piece of information about the training topic. Try to resist this urge and give learners only the information they need to achieve the training goals. This step may feel a little tedious, but it helps keep your compliance training focused and easier to absorb. It also increases the odds that learners will successfully complete their training.

Create your online training in Rise

Once you’ve got your goals defined and your content prioritized, it’s time for the cool and creative part of online training: creating your course.

Making your compliance course in Rise is simple—and fun. 

If you’re looking to jump-start your course, first check out the sample courses and templates in Rise. There are compliance-based ones on topics like sexual harassment and security that could give you a place to start.

If you’re building your training from scratch, start by outlining your lesson topics. Type a lesson name and hit enter on your keyboard. 

Rise is intuitive, so if you’re not happy with how your course content is flowing, you can easily reorder lesson topics by dragging them up or down. 

You can even group lessons into sections by typing a section name and hitting Shift + Enter on your keyboard.

When you’re ready to start adding content to your lessons, they’ll come together quickly. That’s because all Rise lessons are composed of blocks—modular components you can arrange and customize with your content and images. 

Want to grab your learners’ attention? Many training pros kick-start their compliance courses with a video block to set the stage for training. Just insert a video block and upload your video. 

Want to give learners a text summary of the video, or an opportunity to reflect on what they learned from the video? Add a text or list block to summarize the material, or use a knowledge check block to prompt learners to reflect on the key takeaways—or add both! 

If you don’t have video, that’s okay too. The important thing to know is, mixing in a variety of blocks like text, images, multimedia, and interactions (think sorting activities and scenarios, for instance) helps add some instructional variety, so learners aren’t bored while taking their compliance training. 

Share your compliance training with learners

Once your course is ready for launch, Rise makes sharing it easy, too. Specify how you’ll track your course, either the percentage of the course learners complete or a quiz score. You can even assign a due date to make sure everyone completes training in plenty of time. 

From there, enroll your learners in groups or individually. Once people are enrolled, they’ll receive an email telling them they have a course to take and when it’s due. 

And because Rise courses are fully responsive, learners can access their training from any modern web browser on any device, so there’s no excuse for missing a critical training deadline.

Tracking and reporting on compliance training in Rise

One of the most significant benefits of online training is the ability to track how learners engaged with the training so you can measure its impact. For compliance training, the impact is typically measured by course completion rates or quiz scores. 

Rise can help here, too. Once your course is published, and learners are taking it, you can gauge how well they’re doing with Rise’s easy-to-interpret reports. Use reports to get more visibility into how individuals and groups of learners engage with your training and learning paths. You can even see how long they’ve spent in your course—information some regulatory agencies require.

With course reports, you don’t have to survey each learner to see who’s completed what because you can see exactly who’s taken your compliance training, and who’s still in progress with, or overdue on, training. You can even see who hasn’t started the course yet, so you can stay on top of those learners and make sure they don’t miss a critical deadline.

Conclusion

Compliance training is a business necessity, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be a costly and time-consuming undertaking destined to result in dry, droning courses learners dread. By following our simple, three-step approach and using an all-in-one system like Rise, anyone can create compliance training that checks all the boxes for regulators while keeping your learners active and engaged.

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