Training your board of directors and employees is sometimes considered one of the most important tasks in compliance. Why? Without training, all the risk analysis, policy-making, and information gathered through investigations will have little to no effect on future compliance. This article will show you how to better educate your teams by providing a framework to help you design your training.
Training by Design
How do you train people? The honest answer is, it depends. Who are you training, why are you training them, and what do you want them to get out of the training? Focusing on the design of your training will lead you to more effective education.
The cornerstones of your design are:
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Audience
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Objective
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Activities
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Structure
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Content
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Delivery
Creating your design requires you to answer the following questions:
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Who is your audience?
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What is it that they need to know or do better as a result of training?
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What activities will allow them to demonstrate their understanding?
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How will your session be structured?
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What is the critical content needed to support the objective?
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How will you provide the training?
Although your basic objective will be the same for each group you train, how you get there is likely to vary.
This may be easier to understand with an example in mind. Here is a hypothetical scenario for the purpose of this article:
One of your employees unintentionally disclosed proprietary information regarding a new product. The disclosure was investigated, and you learned that the employee did not know that the information was proprietary nor that telling a vendor was inappropriate. You reviewed the policies and determined that there was nothing addressing the disclosure of new products or related information.
The legal team drafted a new policy to reduce the risk of disclosure of similar proprietary information. It is your job to train the entire company, including the board, C-suite, sales, procurement, manufacturing, and administrative staff on this new policy. You have been given six months to have the entire company trained on this new policy.
How do you start? Would your first step be developing a PowerPoint presentation focusing on the words of the policy? Of course, you would first translate it from legalese. If you start there, you are getting ahead of yourself. Content does not form until later in the design. When designing training, it is important to first know who your audiences are, what your objectives are for each audience, and how you can demonstrate and augment their understanding of the policy.
We will start our discussion of training by design by looking at who your audience is, what your objectives are, and what activities will help you meet your objectives. Our hypothetical company breaks down into six different audiences. Thus, you may have as many as six different training designs.