Mandatory training: how to deliver it efficiently

What’s mandatory training?

Mandatory training is any type of course that an employee is required to attend as part of his or her job, in order to be up to date with certain knowledge and skills imposed by the organisation, and it usually includes health and safety training programs, security, or other form of statutory training, specific to a certain sector or professional field. 

L&D professionals, we are sure that you are more familiar with this concept than anyone’s else. We also know that organizing these mandatory training programs is a challenging process, especially when it’s done in the traditional way, meaning face to face, forcing the organization to face a series of blocks, such as the high costs necessary for instructors, learning materials, and usually even travel expenses, not to mention the time resources involved in this process. 

However, you cannot just skip mandatory training just because it is expensive. Nonetheless, what you can do is to make it less costly by choosing another format of delivering the knowledge, which is a LMS. You can use an eLearning platform to record, manage and deliver any mandatory training, with less resources involved and more efficiency in turning knowledge into skills. 

What do you need from a LMS?

From our experience, each company knows best what its needs are, based on a series of factors such as the area of expertise, number of employees, type of training, and so on, but we think that commuting from a traditional training to an online course requires some tools that usually apply to most of the organizations. 

Intuitive course creation and uploading

A LMS should allow you to upload any learning materials you want, based on your training objectives and on your target audience. You can use a series of formats, from simple documents and PDFs to videos and audios, or you can even use the LMS to record the learning material you want to deliver to the employees. 

Evaluate learning outcomes

When organizing mandatory training programs, you should be in full control of the learning progress of the employees and you should be able to test their knowledge after the completion of the course or at any moment of the training you find it necessary. A LMS should give you the possibility to easily and efficiently evaluate the learning progress by means of quizzes or any other evaluation form you find useful. 

Offer the option of flexibility

When you deliver mandatory knowledge, you most probably expect employees to always be up to date with the specific information. That’s why you should choose an eLearning platform that offers you and your employees the possibility to access knowledge anytime and from anywhere. 

Mandatory training on Knolyx: case study

We’ve had the opportunity to work with various companies from various industries, and one of our clients who delivers mandatory training is the Romanian Banking Institute, an organization that addresses the real training needs of employees, professionals or personnel working in other sectors, delivering mandatory training programs tailored to their needs. 

What were their needs when they found us? To test the trainees’ understanding of knowledge after each chapter, as a mandatory requirement to move on to the following chapter and to impose a time requirement in terms of finishing the course. Also, they wanted to use Knolyx as a testing environment for employees, where they were to take a final exam at the end of the training, while getting in-depth reports for the employees’ learning activities. 

Thus, Knolyx understood their needs and offered them the functionalities they needed in order to train their employees, test their knowledge and get in-depth reports throughout the whole process, as it follows:

• RBI uses the streaming functionality to record their mandatory trainings
• they upload all the learning materials into the platform
• they set specific learning paths for the employees
• they use the business rules to implement a time requirement in terms of finishing the courses
• they use the analytics tools to get the in-depth reports they need
• they frequently collaborate with the support team for different things they need

Using an eLearning platform, they reduced the costs of delivering their mandatory courses, they increased employee retention and they reduced the employee training time by 40%, bringing huge value to their learning and development activities and effectively investing in their employees professional development. 

Needless to say, the mandatory training programs differ from one company to another, and that’s why we assess each organization's needs before they actually start using the platform, to make sure that each company makes the most of the learning process.