Posted on July 7, 2006 4:22 AM by
Shanti Atkins
I had a familiar conversation with a prospective client today. The company had purchased a large “library” of compliance courses three years ago from a well-known vendor. As the contract approached its renewal phase, the company ran an audit of actual course usage. The results were not good.
For this particular client, out of a library of 60+ licensed courses, only 7 had been used. Out of this 7, 95+% of the usage rate was for 2 programs -- harassment prevention and ethics. That made the price point per user soar from less than $1 to more than $40. That’s a big jump. And it’s a jump that made the General Counsel say “go find another solution.”
This phenomenon continues to repeat itself among U.S. employers. Several years ago, many companies purchased large volumes of e-learning content, buying into the philosophy that more content equaled more value. Boy were they wrong.
This volume approach results in two critical problems: (1) you pay for a whole whack of stuff you never end up using, and (2) the quality level of what you do use is marginal, as development efforts have been watered down across so many different products.
Most prudent employers spend the bulk of their compliance training efforts, and dollars, on harassment prevention and ethics. That’s the reality. The numbers tell a clear story.
The efficacy of this approach has also been supported by the General Counsel Roundtable (GCR). Its 2004 study of compliance training concluded that there is “no statistically significant relationship between the number of hours employees spend in compliance training and either the level of legal liability or overall satisfaction with the compliance effort.” In fact, according to the GCR study, too much mandatory compliance training actually creates confusion, and may increase legal liability. (View GCR compliance training study) By the way – the CGR study also concluded that there is no difference in effectiveness between in-person and online training. Where were these guys at the AB 1825 hearings? See my Feb ’06 posts on the anti-elearning crusaders …
What’s the best practice? Determine what you need, and carefully consider the volume of training you can actually consume. Then buy or build the very best training you can in those areas. It’s the age old philosophy of quality over quantity.
Tags:
Articles,
ethics training,
harassment training,
training courses,