Compliance training has a bad reputation for being little more than a box-ticking exercise. But here at Saffron we believe it’s absolutely possible to create effective, engaging training that achieves both competence and compliance. Read on for our top five tips for breaking the mould and delivering gold standard compliance training every time.

1. Keep it positive
Avoid the temptation to instruct your learners in what they must and must not do. Try to minimise the number of ‘horror stories’ about the dire consequences of breaking the law. Training that’s driven by fear, or by an organisation’s need to cover its back, is unlikely to really make a difference.

2. Make it relevant
When it comes to compliance, what you do is more important than what you know. So don’t focus on legislative detail; focus instead on what the law means in practice to each individual learner in their day to day work. This is a great step towards achieving enhanced awareness and competence as well as meeting regulatory requirements.

3. Keep it real
One way to achieve that relevance and engage your learners is to use scenarios: create recognisable, everyday situations and get learners to identify the issues and make recommendations. This clearly demonstrates to them what they need to know (and do) and why. It also means they’re more likely to apply this knowledge in the workplace.

4. Make it varied
If learners are engaged in and enjoy a course they’re more likely to learn from it. Use a variety of interactions and media to cater to different learning styles and keep them interested. For example, consider photo or video scenarios, handy downloadable tips, news reports or articles, real life case studies and easy to access dictionaries.

5. Keep it conversational
We’ve had user feedback confirming what we already believed: a plain English, conversational tone of voice contributes to keeping learners engaged and therefore to the effectiveness of the training. Something as simple as this is a change from the norm of compliance training and offers learners a breath of fresh air as well as delivering results.

Download:

Top ten tips for writing an effective, engaging compliance course

Click here or here to find out more about our approach to compliance training. We’ve also recently won an IT Training Award for a compliance training project!

Tags: Compliance, e-Learning, Instructional design