Above: An employee sleeping while taking compliance training.

If you've ever had a corporate job, you know the story...

It's your first day. You're sent a link from HR to a portal with a funky URL that has a bunch more links you have to click, that open something called "Security Awareness Training" or "Code of Conduct Training." It goes for way too long. You hit play and there goes your afternoon. Mindlessly pressing "Next" until you reach the end and receive a certificate you will never see again (Does anyone ever keep these?).

But why? Why does compliance training have to be this way? What's happening within that experience that's causing us to drift off and think about anything else but what we're supposed to be looking at?

I've come up with five reasons I think we're going down the wrong path. Let's dig in.

1. Quantity Over Quality

We're going to bring this back to the point of sale. When looking for a compliance training library there seems to be a huge value put on the amount of courses you can get vs. the amount of quality content you can train with effectively. We're still living the effects of the check the box trainings. Quite simply, with volume comes the same repetitive look, feel and structure applied to every topic, every audience, every objective. The content may have the words you need but the delivery mechanism is going to make that ineffective to the learner. It gets generic very quickly... Speaking of generic...

2. You Lost Me at Generic

Speed is a trade-off for quality. A generic image or video representing a concept that is supposed to be specific to your work life is counterintuitive to say the least. It's like asking for a gourmet sandwich and being handed a McDonald's cheeseburger. I mean I can still eat it, and it is on bread, but it's not what I'm looking for.

We perk up when something connects with us directly. When it feels like it was made for me and my circumstances. It's the difference between "Hi, how are you?" and "Hi Scott, how is your morning going?" We want to feel compliance training is directly applicable to us and when it is, we also feel that someone has put the effort in to look after us.

That's where trust starts to be built.

3. It's Too Predictable

We call it the "Next" button problem. You see the paragraph, the generic image, you click next. Another slide, different image, different text, same feeling. You click next. You eventually realise this is your next 20 to 40 minutes and your brain checks out entirely.

The problem isn't the "Next" button, it's what's on the other side of it. Put the learner in the driver's seat. Have them feel the weight of their decisions and interactions. Earn that next click or tap, don't assume it.

If you don't know what's coming next in a compliance training learning environment, that's a good thing... That's simulating life. And that's where we want to be.

4. Nobody Respected the Learner's Time

In a typical workday there's a lot going on. Employees aren't opening a training fully focused and ready to go. They have emails to send, meetings to get to. And for the most part, they didn't choose to be there. It's mandatory.

Intent matters when it comes to learning. We can't expect learners to retain 30 to 60 minute trainings, or sit through multiple modules in one sitting. A training is one shot on goal. We need to use every tool available to make the training connect in the experience and outside of it.

Training fails when training alone is the answer.

5. It All Looks Different

It happens in every large organization. Multiple departments mean different stakeholders, different budgets, different vendors. What ends up happening is a collection of completely different looking, different feeling training experiences. One animated, one click-through, one live action. No consistency, no shared language, no coherent program.

Building one universe of trainings with a consistent voice, look and feel, gives learners the comfort of familiarity. Now we already have that buy in, we can put all of that energy into making the experience inside it genuinely surprising.

Consistency earns you the right to delight them. Lets see it.

These are just a few of the problems we see again and again in compliance training (and I'm sure we could write a part two!). A lot of the time these issues are attributed to factors happening outside of the training environment, but it's always worth checking ourselves and asking two simple questions: "What is the goal of this training?" and "How will the learner feel when taking it?" If we start there, we can honestly evaluate what we're doing.

If you're interested, custom interactive training is designed to answer exactly those questions, making learning relatable, relevant, and grounded in real-world decisions.

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