What is compliance training? Legal and regulatory compliance is an obligation no business can get out of. It maintains the business’ reputation, ensures employees’ safety, and keeps the profits rolling. Therefore, all companies need to assign a certain portion of their funds to compliance training. However, there have been significant changes in the economic landscape in the past few years, leading new and old firms to reconsider how they allocate resources. E-learning offers multiple avenues for companies to save costs without sacrificing outcomes.
Mandatory compliance training like OSHA is one of many areas where this strategy can be utilized. This article will give you 6 tips to make your compliance training initiatives more cost-effective using e-learning tools and services. Continue reading to find out.
Tip 1: Reuse Assets and Training Materials
The first tip to create cost-effective compliance training is to reuse or re-purpose content you already have. Not only does the reuse of assets cut down on training development time, but it also circumvents having to curate training materials from scratch.
Some examples of repurposed and reused assets are:
- Converting written content into consumable pamphlets, e-books, and presentations
- Turning statistics into graphs, pie charts, tables, etc.
- Condensing regulatory guidelines into quick bulleted lists
- Clipping compliance-related videos from existing courses
- Extracting the audio from video-based courses to turn them into podcasts or narrating written content for podcasts
Tip 2: Use Pre-made Templates
Designing course templates takes time, money, and effort. Businesses looking to be careful with their training costs can solve this problem by using readymade templates. Most e-learning authoring tools come with a library of templates to choose from. If these don’t appeal to you, you can purchase or download free templates online. Websites like Pinterest or just a simple Google search can point you in the right direction for your browsing. These templates are made by seasoned graphic designers and e-learning professionals and are usually compatible with rapid authoring tools.
Courses made on templates can also be updated very easily without having to re-do the entire course, which is another expenditure dodged.
Tip 3: Use a Readymade Course
Most industries have some common regulatory bodies and frameworks that they follow. If you want to avoid spending on custom-made training materials, many e-learning vendors offer readymade industry-specific compliance training modules. Such courses require little to no tweaking and can be uploaded to your company’s LMS instantly. Going this route even for some of your compliance modules can save you resources that you can then allocate elsewhere.
Tip 4: Outsource Your E-learning Development
This might sound counterintuitive at first, but outsourcing content development allows organizations to reserve their manpower for core business processes.
Additionally, a dedicated L&D department or compliance head is not feasible for smaller businesses or those on a tight budget. In such cases, firms run the risk of delivering poorly constructed training programs that fail to meet compliance objectives. These training gaps cost organizations more in the longer term as non-compliance incidents have significant financial and reputational penalties that are difficult to recover from. E-learning vendors have years of training and development experience and understand the demands of delivering online courses, thus, your compliance training needs will be in better care being outsourced if your current teams lack the expertise.
Tip 5: Use Rapid Authoring Tools
For businesses that already have training personnel, a rapid authoring tool is a must-have. Rapid authoring tools are e-learning development programs that offer rich content libraries and assessment templates for building device-responsive online courses. The biggest benefit of rapid authoring tools is that they do not require coding skills. Thus, investing in one will mean hiring one less developer for your business.
Tip 6: Conduct a Careful Compliance Risk Assessment
It’s very common for businesses to end up investing in the wrong compliance domains to stay on top of their social responsibility game. Thus, before investing in e-learning content, organizations should first conduct a compliance risk assessment. The primary focus during such assessments should be to identify domains where most non-compliance incidents have occurred, domains where non-compliance has not been an issue, and the level of control each risk requires.
Risk management has 4 levels of control, with the highest level being the best at ensuring non-incidents:
- The first level is to avoid the risk, which eliminates it completely
- The second level is to reduce the chances of the risk occurring
- The third level is to transfer the risk
- The fourth level is to retain the risk by preparing mitigation strategies in advance
By using a structured approach like this, you can prevent pouring precious resources into the wrong compliance areas and develop more effective training efforts for the risks that need extra attention.
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6 Tips for Cost-Effective Compliance Training Using E-Learning
Conclusion
E-learning offers everything from software to asset reuse and outsourcing content development as options to cut down on compliance training costs. There is a solution for businesses of every shape and size.
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