When you operate in highly regulated industries like financial services, aviation, manufacturing, energy production, and others, your business and its employees are bound by rigorous laws, regulations, and organizational policies. These strict expectations keep employees and consumers safe, but nobody arrives in your business with a comprehensive understanding of every law and policy—and even long-time employees need periodic refreshers. That’s where compliance training comes in.

An Overview of Compliance Training in Highly Regulated Industries

Compliance training programs are courses and modules that educate your workforce on the rules and regulations that apply to their typical job responsibilities. Your workforce needs to understand how their actions on the job can impact not just their own health and wellbeing but that of their clients or customers.

For instance, training content on safety protocols gives employees essential knowledge so they can identify and mitigate risks on the job. These types of courses are crucial for organizations like transportation companies and healthcare systems where customers, patients, and employees can easily encounter situations that result in serious injury or death when safety regulations aren’t followed.

Organizations also leverage compliance training to create a more hospitable work environment. Compliance content can include anti-harassment and discrimination training courses that educate employees on behaviors that are not acceptable in the workplace.

Mandatory compliance training teaches employees how to avoid violating organizational policies and legal regulations. Explicitly teaching your workers how to avoid breaking essential rules can in turn help to protect your organization in the event of an incident. Should one of your employees fail to follow safety procedures and an injury occurs, your documentation of that individual’s completed compliance training will help your organization build its defense against any legal liability.

These courses are, admittedly, not the most thrilling learning programs for your employees, but they’re essential for keeping everyone safe—including your organization!

KEEP READING ‘3 Success-Driving Functions Every Compliance-Focused LMS Must Have’

Leverage an LMS to Deliver Compliance Training: Practical Use Cases

In-person training workshops and courses are one way to ensure your employees receive essential compliance information, but they shouldn’t be the only way you’re delivering such important content. Hands-on training is great for helping your workers get comfortable with some scenarios, like healthcare workers who must practice safety-related competencies so they’re prepared for real-life incidents. More sensitive compliance topics like discrimination or sexual misconduct courses, on the other hand, can make some employees uncomfortable in group settings and are better suited to more private learning environments like online training modules.

Delivering compliance training in person also means tackling logistics challenges such as:

• Determining where to host the courses
• Deciding how many employees should or can attend at once
• Selecting a method for tracking attendance and completion of course requirements
• Choosing who will teach the courses (and how they’ll be compensated, if applicable)
• Managing the job responsibilities of those workers participating in a training course

In-person compliance training shouldn’t be completely eliminated, especially for employees who primarily have hands-on roles that impact your clients or customers. In fact, your in-person training events and outcomes should be tracked with your LMS to help you maintain compliance. However, there are many instances where an LMS can successfully replace face-to-face instruction and reduce some logistics burdens for your L&D team.

Consider the following use cases for delivering compliance training with an LMS:

Training in Healthcare

Healthcare systems can employ thousands of people across multiple campuses, making it challenging to coordinate in-person training events. More and more healthcare organizations are streamlining their essential training with an LMS. The LMS lets employees access their onboarding documents, compliance training modules, professional development courses, and other materials in one place. Courses can be automatically assigned to employees based on their roles, and workers can easily access resources that help them learn how to operate equipment, respond to common patient requests, and even perform certain bedside procedures.

With an LMS, healthcare organizations can create user profiles with detailed information about each person’s progress on their compliance training requirements. The user profiles help HR departments manage employee certifications, track course completion rates for individuals and teams, and make assessments about organization-wide compliance performance. The user data stored in these profiles also makes it easier for organizations to demonstrate compliance when auditors, regulatory bodies, and accreditation agencies like The Joint Commission or Care Quality Commission come knocking at your door.

Healthcare organizations are also using LMSs to develop their employees and leadership staff. These organizations are creating educational pathways that guide employees through relevant skills development courses. As employees progress through the learning content, they enhance their skills and competencies so they can grow in their careers. The workers’ data can be used alongside performance metrics to aid organizations in their succession planning efforts while helping employees find pathways to fulfilling career moves.

RELATED READING FOR HEALTHCARE LEADERS | ‘How Digital Skills Management Prepares Your Healthcare Organization for a Joint Commission Visit’

Compliance Training in the Energy Industry

The energy sector is one of the most highly regulated industries. Organizations are held to extremely high standards due to the potentially disastrous outcomes that can occur when policies and procedures aren’t properly followed. That’s why many energy companies won’t allow new employees to start work until they’ve completed their required training courses. With an LMS, new employees can complete their training either on-site or at their own homes as long as they have an internet-enabled device. The LMS gives energy organizations and new hires flexibility in when and how onboarding and required compliance training will take place.

Energy organizations may also leverage an LMS to offer training courses that help their employees earn industry-recognized certifications. These can include the handling of hazardous materials, working in confined spaces, operating heavy machinery, and more. Companies can use their LMS to offer blended training sessions that combine online content, in-person seminars or training sessions, and course evaluations.

Regulatory agencies like the EPA and OSHA in the United States and the European Environment Agency require organizations to demonstrate proof that their employees are following laws and regulations meant to protect workers, customers, and the environment. The LMS stores all of the employees’ certification and course data, giving organizations a fast and reliable way to demonstrate their compliance.

Aviation Compliance

There are many moving parts in the aviation industry, and these organizations need to ensure their thousands of employees (who are often located across the globe) comply with all applicable laws and safety standards. A mobile-ready LMS is a convenient way for these organizations to reach their pilots, flight attendants, and other employees who frequently travel and might find it difficult to access traditional, face-to-face training environments. Through a tablet or other mobile device, these employees can complete their compliance training courses at their convenience without missing their regular flight duties.

Like other industries previously mentioned, companies in the aviation sector must also be able to demonstrate evidence of their regulatory compliance to the FAA if they’re based in the United States and EASA for those based in Europe, as well as any other applicable international agencies. It’s important for these organizations to have a means to track each employee’s progress on their compliance training courses. An LMS lets L&D and HR teams quickly identify which employees are on track with their training requirements, as well as who needs to recertify their qualifications. Instructors and LMS administrators can automatically enroll employees in relevant development courses and send reminder notifications to help everyone stay on track with their mandatory training.

RELATED READING | ‘3 Steps to Choosing the Right LMS in Highly Regulated Industries’

The Future of Compliance Training

Compliance training is moving further away from “sit and get” methods, the kind of courses that employees take to “check a box” and move on with their day. Instead, organizations are seeing the value in personalized training and doing more to embed learning into the flow of their employees’ everyday work. Taking a personalized approach to employee training can help organizations facilitate growth and retain their workers.

Embedding compliance training into workflows also makes the training more meaningful and relevant for employees. They don’t have to recall how previous training material relates to a current situation, and they aren’t burdened with the task of remembering everything from their training courses because the information is readily available. According to Gartner, embedding compliance training into regular workflows leads to a 30% drop in highly burdened employees. Gartner also found that employees who aren’t heavily burdened have 70% lower noncompliance than their highly burdened counterparts.

An LMS can assist with embedding training into daily operations, especially if the platform includes AI capabilities. Generative AI trained with your organization’s policies and procedures can immediately answer employees’ questions regarding a potential compliance issue. This saves workers time because they don’t have to go searching for the answers in a prior course module. The generative AI chatbot can provide the answer and offer suggestions to the employee on next steps they can consider.

Another way to embed compliance training into workflows is to align it with skills development initiatives. This helps make the compliance training feel less like a chore and more like an essential aspect of career development. When you align compliance training with skills and career development courses, your workforce will be more likely to see the value in the training and engage with the content.

Compliance training will continue developing alongside technology. Securing resources and tools like a robust LMS will help you provide meaningful and relevant learning to your employees while protecting your organization from liabilities associated with noncompliance.

READ MORE ON AI | ‘The Role of AI in L&D (Plus How to Address Its Potential Risks)’