Think about it: 60 percent of the world’s internet population can be reached in their native language by making your content available in just English, Mandarin and Spanish. Add seven more languages and you’re up to 83 percent of the modern workforce. Historically, the benchmark for appraising the success of a global compliance program is the number of languages it is available in. While this may keep local labor organizations happy, it’s a crude evaluation of learning effectiveness.
In this article, we consider a number of key ideas that are gaining traction as global businesses plan their compliance training strategy for 2015.
Seven Ideas to Support Your 2015 Compliance Training Strategy
1. Think about global scenarios. Scenarios are the crux of effective compliance teaching; think about scenarios that are both relevant to a regional audience and give learners a sense of belonging to a global enterprise.
2. Teach principles, not regulations. Variance in local policies, such as pertaining to gifts and entertainment spending limits, can make for complex global curricula; instead, focus on teaching ethical principles and taking action while linking to the latest local policy documents.
3. Set a global gold standard. Similarly, once you step up to running a compliance program on a global scale, think about setting a worldwide gold standard that engages the entire business rather than simply repurposing a program built to your head office’s specifications.
4. Empower local business groups. A global gold standard also gives local business units the framework, and freedom, to independently solve their local needs. Think about how low-cost assets such as PDF templates distributed to local markets can function alongside your flagship worldwide learning media.
5. Map out your content management strategy. Managing just six compliance courses in 20 languages creates the potential for uploading and administering 120 SCORM packages in your LMS. And that’s before allowing for updates and region-specific content. Think about using an AICC port to bridge to an external compliance library to greatly simplify this task.
6. Decide if eLearning is right for every market. Compliance training is synonymous with eLearning based on its effectiveness at pushing standardized training program to a large audience. As you support smaller countries, the ROI for localizing eLearning for populations under 500 learners becomes cost-prohibitive. Consider virtual classroom delivery as an alternative for the final mile of your international workforce.
7. Don’t forget your update strategy. Managing a multilingual program with region-specific learning creates a tremendous number of variables compared to a domestic training program. This complexity becomes even more of a challenge as compliance training needs frequent updating. Map out a clear multiyear content refresh strategy from day one to save time and keep your overhead manageable in the future.
Implementing an effective compliance training strategy could be the all-important ingredient in your organization’s success this year. Compliance training is not merely just a means of risk management or cost reduction – it actively contributes to revenue generation and also enhances the brand and reputation of a business. This is far too often overlooked.
