4 Ways To Breathe New Life Into Your Safety And Compliance Training

4 Ways To Breathe New Life Into Your Safety And Compliance Training
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Summary: Refreshing course content and adding new learning tools are some of the simplest ways to increase interest and satisfaction in your company's corporate training program.

How To Breathe New Life Into Your Safety And Compliance Training

Safety and compliance training is not always the most exciting topic. Many people see it as a box you need to check to be able to keep an accreditation or satisfy some other career requirement. But that mindset needs to change. With a host of new technologies and innovations available, online training providers have the ability to engage learners more than ever before. They can help learners remember why this training is so important in the first place. In many fields, like construction and engineering, safety and compliance training is crucial. On a construction site, for example, you really can’t afford to have accidents – proper safety training can be the difference between saving a life or suffering a severe accident.

With stakes so high, we need to continuously find new ways to help engage workers and increase interest in training topics. Here are 4 of them:

1. Storytelling

Storytelling isn’t just for children. Used in training, it is an engaging and effective way to increase interest and retention in your safety topic. By telling a story, and creating a relatable situation, the importance of the topic is highlighted and the lesson becomes more memorable.

As adult learners, when we understand the significance of the training we are receiving and how it can help or hurt us in real-life terms, it tends to more directly impact us. This is especially helpful in coursework as it makes information more easily retainable for long-term use.

2. Badging And Gamification

You win! Research shows that when we have incentives to win and do well, we perform better. According to a study by the University of Colorado, participants in gamified eLearning experiences scored 14% higher in skills-based assessments, 11% higher in factual knowledge and had a 9% increase in retention rate.

So, what better way to help learners engage in a safety and compliance course than by adding a competitive element?

Numerous online learning platforms and course providers are integrating this format into their content. Some examples of gamification include badging, point systems, levels of completion, activity feeds, and avatars. Making work more like a game helps us to change the perception of the tasks we are performing. And, when we have a more positive perception about our tasks, this breeds more satisfaction, and thus, better performance.

3. Refreshing Content

Online learning has been around for over two decades and that is how long many of us have been creating eLearning – leaving old and tired courses out in the field. Refreshing your aging content is key. Nothing says boredom (and loss of interest) faster than when a student goes to start their required compliance training and it’s the same corporate ethics content they’ve clicked through for the past five years. Or when your safety course on confined spaces includes video of subjects with bell bottom pants, thick sideburns and pompadours.

Updating an aging course library can seem like a daunting task, but with today’s access to inexpensive and quick technologies like video and animation tools, it’s easier than ever to give your courses a makeover. Off-the shelf course authoring solutions are available that allow almost any level of course developer to quickly update a course.

You can also supplement or replace old videos with online sources. From online news to YouTube, the internet is overflowing with plenty of new original content to put a modern spin on the same old (but important) training. You can also identify some new case studies online or within your own business to tell the story.

If you have the budget, invest in some new customized courses that use innovative technology like virtual reality or 360 video.

4. Social Learning

Social media has changed the way we interact with our friends, family, and colleagues, making sharing everything from what you ate for breakfast to where you are going on vacation an integral part of your everyday activity. This “social concept” can –and should– extend to your online safety and compliance training program. Giving students the tools to share what they are learning and collaborate on ideas encourages them to think deeper about a subject. If they’re interacting then they need to have internalized an understanding of the topic to contribute to the conversation.

Learners can collaborate using popular platforms like Facebook, Skype, or Google Hangouts. They can team up on a project in Google documents or on Basecamp.

Message boards are also an effective and popular ways to socialize online. Open a forum for learners to exchange dialogue or thoughts on a case study or new skill they just learned. This facilitates better understanding of the topic through discussions with peers. You can even incorporate gamification by offering points or rewards for various levels of activity on message board engagement. The more you participate, the higher your chances of winning recognition.

The key to reinvigorate your safety and compliance training is finding new ways to present or augment the content you already have. We do not need to reinvent the wheel, we just need to dust it off.