Employees generally don’t like compliance training, but not for the reasons you think. They find it too boring, too long, irrelevant, too easy to cheat, so then why bother? If an organization cannot get their employees to engage in anti-fraud training, then there is a bigger cultural problem there.
Start With Behavioral Outcomes, Not Legal Text
Many compliance programs aren’t developed with the right perspective. Typically, the necessary regulation is obtained, put into bullet points, and used as the basis for a training. However, regulations outline what has to be done, not how someone would actually do it.
Rather than drafting a single piece of content, first, identify the behavior that should be impacted. For instance, not “employees will be aware of the latest phishing norms” but “employees will be able to identify the visual markers of a phishing email and implement the three-step reporting process within 24 hours.” When that is your starting point, the content you are developing dramatically shifts.
With a behavioral objective in mind, the training will also become more pragmatic. You are not training individuals to remember the text of a law, you are helping them act when it’s a regular workday and something suspicious has been sent to them in an email. And this will be content people can use.
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Build For the Workday People Actually Have
The right platform can support pre-tests to jump straight to the content people actually need, as well as satisfying post-tests and quizzes where required. That’s where choosing the right compliance training software becomes part of the learning design conversation, it includes real-time tracking and metrics not just to confirm completion, but to monitor engagement with the material, understand the sticking points, and potentially identify areas of the material that may need revision.
Getting usability right even extends beyond the learning content itself. If you have an integrated platform that also handles shift schedules, swaps, and manager announcements, then those training reminders can come at the most useful times for an individual, like the beginning of their shift. It means they are far less likely to just scroll past it or ignore it under stress.
As more of your team receives the training, having an LCMS that actually suggests additional relevant modules based on what they’ve completed, or even which roles they’ve been covering based on shift swaps, can help build on your existing training investment instead of duplicating it for much more granular scaling than a yearly all-team approach.
Replace Slide Decks With Decisions
When we present learners with static text slides, they tend to lose interest quickly and just click through while absorbing very little information since there is nothing to engage them and motivate them to pay attention.
However, confronting them with a scenario that they may face in their day-to-day work (a supplier making an uncharacteristic offer, a customer requesting data they are not authorized to receive, a co-worker cutting corners on safety measures) and asking them to make a decision based on that scenario will engage their brains in a way that passive reading would not.
Show how they fare based on their choices, and they will understand the reasoning behind the related compliance regulation automatically. Branching scenarios work especially well in these situations, as they naturally mimic the real-life decision-making process: grey, based on circumstances, and having consequences.
Respect What People Already Know
One of the quickest ways to have a valuable employee head for the door is forcing them to go through training on content they were familiar with before taking three subsequent positions. It sends an immediate signal that the training wasn’t intended for their benefit, it was legal protection for the company, and if they happen to learn something that’s a happy side effect.
Pre-assessment eliminates this problem by allowing the employee to “test out” of training content they’ve already mastered. They only invest time in what they genuinely need training on, so engagement isn’t instantly eroded by three hours of obvious, and costly, box-ticking.
Role-based content shares the same principle. A warehouse operative faces different compliance risks to a finance manager, so their training should not be a one-size-fits-all solution. When an employee knows their training content was built with their specific responsibilities in mind, rather than as a checkbox for an entire department, the value is inherently clear.
Ditch the High-Stakes Final Exam
Completing a single 50-point quiz after taking a training course is more a test of one’s ability to knuckle down for an hour or so and wolf down some questions than a measure of one’s understanding of compliance. And it’s certainly not a measure of long-term retention. It’s also likely to be a source of anxiety.
Instead, a series of ultra-low-stakes “pulse checks” should be incorporated. A couple of short, easy questions at the start of a new module help to reactivate and consolidate the information from a previous module. This easy idea is based on one of the most robust findings from the science of learning: the ‘spacing effect’.
More frequent testing has the additional benefit of providing richer, more granular quantitative data to L&D managers on who knows what.
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The Bottom Line
Training on compliance that is effective is training that acknowledges the individual undertaking it, their time, their current expertise, and their right to know the reason behind a rule’s existence, and not just its presence. When you develop based on those ideas, you don’t have to frighten individuals with the results to get them to take it. They do it because their time is valuable.
