Compliance Training Doesn’t Have To Be Boring: How To Make It Engaging

Forget Boring Compliance Training

Mandatory compliance training has a bad reputation—it’s seen as boring and often nothing more than a tick-box exercise to sit through in a lecture or click next through in static eLearning. Such training is often delivered as part of an employee onboarding process.

There are two major problems for an organisation when this is the case:

• When the emphasis is on just getting through the material and gaining the Pass, the learner may not have been mentally engaged in a way that will ensure retention and truly impact their behaviour long-term, helping to manage personal and business risk.
• It sets a scene for training in general to be boring and “unimportant” to the individual, so when a learner has access to learning that can boost their performance and benefit the whole company, they lack the enthusiasm to jump in and engage.

To avoid creating a culture of disinterest when it comes to learning, here we look at how to make compliance training engaging through the use of effective eLearning content and a learning platform that makes it easy and enjoyable to access.

Make It Relevant To The Learner’s Role

Information instantly becomes more boring when you feel that it will never relate to your life. While some training content will be relevant to the entire workforce, try to minimise the use of generic content throughout, where it has limited relevance to certain roles.

The use of branching scenarios means that you can deliver globally relevant training at the outset, but which then forks down role-specific paths. For example, certain modules may be signposted for frontline workers, while managers/supervisors can be taken down a different path.

The greater appreciation of context will mean that the learner sees relevance within their day-to-day role.

Make It Accessible

If you want compliance training to not only get completed, but absorbed and really assimilated into working practice, then it’s important to enable learners to access it in a manner, at a time, and in a place that suits them.

Unless the training needs to be consumed at a desk on day one, then mobile-friendly eLearning enables anytime, anywhere learning. Might your learners want or need to access the materials on the go? A good learning platform will make it easy for learners to access training anywhere, and for HR or L&D teams to track progress across individuals and groups.

Make It Brief

Bite-sized learning or microlearning enables them to access training in chunks that allow for consolidation between sessions.

Numerous studies over the last century, notably Miller’s Law that originated back in the 1950s, have shown that a small number of items (five to nine) can be held in your short-term memory before new information starts to crowd those items out.

Deliver training in small chunks that enable consolidation into long-term memory between sessions, and create a level of testing and repetition to really help training stick.

Make It Visually Appealing

Some colour and vibrance will help draw learners into training content and create a better vibe than just black-and-white text. Even the driest and most technical of subjects can be brought to life with some colour and movement.

Make It Multimedia

Everyone consumes, absorbs, and retains information differently. Some people are drawn to reading text, while others struggle—regardless of proficiency in their work. Some find that they enjoy or learn faster with the audio and visual combination of videos, while for some it’s annoying or they are unable to have the sound on at their desk.

Where possible, provide options within an eLearning course so that every type of learner is catered for.

Make It Fun: Gamify

Even those who display zero signs of competitiveness enjoy games, or at least rewards, now and again. Either games-based learning or the introduction of game-playing elements within a traditional system (gamification) is shown to improve learning outcomes. In fact, gamification has been shown to enhance motivation and improve psychological and behavioural outcomes in multiple arenas.

Some modern LMS solutions make it easy for you to create gamification elements within the platform, such as badges or other awards for achievements and learning milestones. You can even create a level of competition between individuals or departments to further increase motivation.

A good eLearning content example on the subject of cyber security is the eLearning game Cyber Crime Time.

Cyber Crime Time is a highly interactive game where you, the learner, get to take on the role of a hacker.

A normally dry compliance topic is brought to life by allowing the learner to learn about the risks of cybercrime and how to protect data in a novel way.

In Summary

By following the above steps to making compliance training more engaging, you can help to ensure that the content is really absorbed in order to manage risk.

You’ll also help to make learning part of the culture within your organisation, leading to employees being happy to—even seeking—personal and professional development opportunities.

Originally published at www.im-c.com.