Finding Method Amongst the Madness
Nashua (US), June 2008 - Content management is emerging, generally, as a key challenge in the sphere of learning systems. Organizations operating in highly regulated environments - those in health sciences, aviation, banking and financial services - are facing significant content management issues with specific regard to training related to regulatory compliance. Such organizations must provide training and certification, with regard to regulatory schemes that address, e.g., security, privacy, data retention, health and safety, or the license to sell specific regulated products or services.
Issues include:
- The sheer volume of training that must be developed in terms of unit effort, cost and time.
- Acts, regulations and policies change frequently. The effort required keeping content current is significant. Moreover, individual employees who have been trained at different points in time must all be kept up-to-date.
- Many certifications require re-certification at regular intervals.
- The training must be effective otherwise exposure to risk increases. To facilitate these aims training courses should be differentiated by role.
- In national or global organizations, there is the additional problem that regulatory regimes vary across different regional and national boundaries.
- Time to performance is affected by the requirement to achieve certification or qualification for a wide range of regulatory schemes. How long, for instance, before a new employee in the financial services industry can finally sell a certain class of investment instruments or offer related services?
Modern, sophisticated learning content management systems (LCMS) provide a toolset that is indispensable in the effort to address these challenges. Using a best-of-breed LCMS, content can be up-dated efficiently using nontechnical authoring tools.
Version control and history and records management functionality ensure that organisations can track the specific changes made. These changes are time stamped and determine the exact content an individual has seen. Secure electronic signatures and acknowledgements can be integrated with processes instantiated in electronic workflow to provide a fully documented audit trail of content creation, revision and distribution.
LCMS also enable the rapid creation of multiple variants of a course that differ in some respects, and facilitate the maintenance of these variants by re-using a single instance of the common content across all relevant versions. This means, that a US insurance association can develop and maintain 50 versions of a regulatory training program, reflecting the variations across the different states.
LCMS can also track which individuals have received training, and notify them when changes to content have occurred. Rather than have employees go through training repeatedly, LCMS can also be used to allow employees to -œtest out- of training, or demonstrate that they have acquired accurate, up to date knowledge of regulatory requirements. Any gaps can be remediated through modular content that is tied to the specific objectives that have been missed, as identified through testing, rather than by subjecting the employee to an all-inclusive program.
With these capabilities, LCMS can reduce risk, increase compliance, reduce the cost associated with training, and decrease the time required to achieve and maintain certifications thus raising overall productivity.
View the 5 minute demo to learn how LCMSs address regulatory compliancy challenges.
