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How to Make Mandatory Training Engaging

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Wed Nov 01 2023

How to Make Mandatory Training Engaging
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Let’s face it: Employees tend to perceive compliance training as a necessary evil. They may feel obliged to attend training while thinking it would be better to invest their time in actual work tasks.

To their credit, some businesses are able to make compliance training more scalable and paperless by turning multipage, dusty memos into simple online courses. However, the question of how to help employees focus on mandatory training and retain the important information remains open.

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In this blog post, we’ll continue to explore the topic of compliance training and offer a few tips on how to revamp online compliance training with the proper technology.

Get Сreative With Assessments

First and foremost, enhance your online courses about compliance with exercises, quizzes, or mini games to help knowledge stick. Go beyond mere true-or-false questions and create hotspot, drag-and-drop, or matching questions. To prompt learners to search their memory, you can create a timed quiz. It’s also helpful to set the duration of a particular slide in advance, thus preventing learners from mindless clicking.

Narrate Your Courses

Sheets of text in compliance courses are an absolute no-no. Training content will be much more engaging and memorable if it’s accompanied by an instructor’s voice, fostering a multisensorial approach. With the proper e-learning authoring tool, it won’t take long to add narration to a presentation or course. Built-in AI-powered text-to-speech engines can help you do that without voice actors or renting a studio and equipment. You’ll have natural-sounding voices in different languages and be able to narrate courses in minutes.

Another way to create the effect of presence is by supplementing your online course with a video, such as a short talking head or presenter-style video. Seeing the face of an instructor will help learners avoid getting distracted from the important topic at hand.

Immerse Into Context

You can also create the effect of presence and make training much more relevant for your learners with characters placed in workplace situations. Characters are personas that can represent the same ethnic, cultural, or professional group as your learners and be assigned similar work tasks. Typically, you can select a character from a content library that might come bundled with an authoring tool. Or create them based on someone’s appearance with a character builder feature.

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Using characters, your learners can study and practice compliance in role-plays that mimic real-life situations without any risks. Besides, you can determine several outcomes for a given situation using branching scenarios. This will provide more context for a training topic and help employees learn from experience.

Leverage Interactive Longread Formats

Even though online course creation may not require solid tech skills or complex authoring software, some teams prefer to work with longreads, or page-like training content. Longreads are easier and faster to create than full-fledged courses, and they can engage learners with multimedia and assessments. So, why not opt for this lightweight format for compliance training?

Besides, you can update courses like these much more quickly, and this is great for compliance, the regulations of which change frequently. To make and edit courses in a longread format, you can opt for a cloud tool with online review and collaboration functionality.

Cloud-based authoring tools are not limited to operating systems; some of them are even AI-powered. For example, the AI content editor integrated into iSpring Suite Max and iSpring Page makes it much easier to generate polished texts for your longread courses and makes them look presentable without much effort. So, if you want to create smart compliance courses as quickly as possible while keeping them visually appealing, this is a solid choice.

Final Thoughts

Compliance training can be a necessary evil, but with a little effort, it can become so much more engaging and effective for the company’s safety and security. We highly recommend not underestimating the importance of using quizzes, narrations, and characters, and experimenting with ways of presenting the material. That way, your compliance training courses have every chance of transforming from simply mandatory to really engaging.

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