What we call online learning, or eLearning, is not one single thing, but many. It’s like with cats, tigers, panthers and pumas. Sure, they’re all felines, but at the same time there are major differences in look, size, eating habits, natural habitat, and, last but not least, cuteness.
Online learning can similarly be divided into several different types, based on various factors, such as whether it concerns educational or corporate use (online schools vs corporate training), the mode of consumption (web based, mLearning etc.), or even the scope of each individual learning unit (e.g. microlearning).
In this series of posts we’ll examine how TalentLMS fares for each and every variety of online learning, starting with Compliance Training.
Why Comply?
First things first: what is this “compliance training” thing, and why should you care about it?
Well, compliance training refers to the process of educating your employees on all the local and international laws and regulations that apply to their job positions, as well as any company policies that they have to comply with.
Compliance training can be state-mandated, if for example, you can’t work in an industry without going through it; only necessary for working with particular clients, like if you apply for public tenders, supply the military; only necessary for operating in particular markets, in the case that you have to comply with local rules to sell your products to another country; or even completely optional but nice to have, such as training in business ethics, social responsibility and racial discrimination issues.
If your company or parent company, in the case of a franchise or an enterprise with multiple facilities and subsidiaries, has its own internal guidelines, those should be considered a part of compliance training too, distinct from the general training in specific business skills.
How TalentLMS handles Compliance Training
At the heart of it, compliance training is not that different than most other forms of corporate training. As with anything else, it’s still based on specific learning materials that you have to incorporate in an online learning course.
Which, incidentally, is where TalentLMS shines, allowing anybody to easily design, implement and deliver a comprehensive compliance training program (or, rather, programs).
Create compliance training content…
TalentLMS’ course creation tools, like the content editor, the advanced importing engine which allows you to leverage all kinds of third-party files, from Word docs to videos, and its excellent support for tests, quizzes and surveys, make it easy to produce full-blown compliance training content.
…or buy ready-made content
For compliance training in topics that are common to most businesses or even industries, you might find that you don’t even need to create anything.
See, TalentLMS has a built-in learning content Marketplace, which, among other things, includes lots of professionally-made compliance training courses that you can just buy and immediately use in your LMS.
The available courses include anything from a generic material such as “Disability Awareness”, “Bullying in the Workplace”, “Professional Ethics”, to specialized compliance courses for specific industries, like “Asbestos Awareness”, “Work safely in the construction industry”, “Excavator Training”, and more.
Certify compliance.
Having your employees take compliance courses is not enough, especially for the law. You also need to make sure they have digested and understood the material, and keep track of their compliance-related training and certifications.
This is where TalentLMS’ built-in support for Certificates will come in handy.
With TalentLMS you can create as many certifications as you need, configure their behavior, create custom reports to see statistics on certificates awarded based on course completions, and, of course, customize them to match your business branding (colors, logo, etc).
(For most state related compliance training cases, you’ll only need to track which users have which certificates from within your learning platform. For other cases, where you want to print and hand out certificates to your employees, TalentLMS flexible certificate design will be handy).
In cases where compliance is achieved after the employee passes not one, but multiple courses on different subjects, which is quite common in several professions, TalentLMS allows you to have certificates to be awarded upon course completion, or upon the completion of a set comprised of multiple related courses.
Just make each course a pre-requisite for the others via the course’s “Availability rules” configuration, and have the final course award the certificate.
And when the law, or the company, requires expiring certificates and re-examination, like what doctors, pilots and several other professions have to go through to retain their licenses, TalentLMS offers “time-limited” (auto-expiring) certificates — including the ability for admins to manually revoke any user’s certificate from within TalentLMS’ management page.
Legal protection
In today’s litigation-heavy climate, it’s unavoidable, especially for larger businesses, to occasionally get involved in lawsuits with employees or customers.
TalentLMS’ certificates and attendance logs can serve as proof that you have informed your employees about labor safety, customer protection laws, gambling rules, sexual harassment issues, ethical issues, etc., in case of legal dispute.
Of course, consult with your legal team first to ensure whether this applies to your jurisdiction.
Microlearning the microcompliance?
Well, microcompliance is not actually a thing, but utilizing microlearning for compliance training is.
Of course, some compliance training material is (and is required by law to be) bulky and unreadable. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t assist your employees in digesting it by offering them a more lightweight, and more engaging microlearning version of the most important points.
That’s doubly true when training your employees in non-mandatory, but nowadays essential topics, like sexual harassment and racial discrimination issues. Microlearning can help you highlight the gist of each issue, and teach your employees the professional behavior to which they are expected to comply.
And since microlearning works best when done from a mobile device, and on the employees’ own chosen time and place, it’s a good fit for trying with TalentLMS for iOS and (soon) Android. The fully mobile client app to the Cloud-based TalentLMS service offers almost the full functionality of its desktop counterpart, but with a simpler, streamlined interface that makes microlearning shine.
Plus, with support for content download and periodic progress syncing, it can work equally well online and offline.
Conclusion
In this post we had a look at what compliance training involves, and how compliance training software can help you.
Stay tuned for the rest of the series, as we’ll continue to examine each and every kind of training that TalentLMS caters to.
