Barbara-Ann Boehler, senior director of the Corporate Compliance and Ethics program at Fordham Law School, shares methods with Compliance & Ethics Professional® (CEP Magazine) that can be employed to try to “up” the compliance training game.
Compliance training is . . . not very exciting. It is a challenge to develop training that is engaging when the material is often compulsory and driven by regulatory requirements. While compliance officers are loath to “check the box” regarding any component of their program, sometimes training just feels like a box-checking exercise.
If you have worked in a highly regulated industry, you are very familiar with the (dreaded) mandatory annual compliance training: You’ve either sat through it or had to design it or both. Often, these trainings are designed by compliance and legal associates who have a personal bias about how they are supposed to look. You might be familiar with text-heavy PowerPoint slides drafted by someone who believes every word is important. Training sessions like that are difficult to sit through (or click through) and even more difficult to ingest and then remember. If trainings are boring, unmemorable, and our learners are not taking anything from them, are they really anything more than a check-the-box exercise?
There are some methods that we can employ to try to “up” our compliance training game, including the use of games—more on that later. We can look to develop training courses that are not only compliant with our regulatory scheme but also take into consideration the way that people learn and the distractions that are inherent in our technologically heavy lives.