If You Want To Make Your Compliance Training A Hit, "Kill" It
Does Betty in Accounting look like she might poke your eyes out when you pass in the hallway? Do you feel like your life is in danger on the way to the breakroom, because it’s “that time of year” again? That’s right; it is compliance training time.
Trying to get people excited about the yearly compliance training can leave you down and frustrated. It can also make you feel like you are the most hated person in the building; but I am here to tell you there is light at the end of the tunnel. Go from zero to hero and “slay” that training; with just a few simple techniques.
I was recently given the task of creating the yearly Anti-money Laundering (AML) training for my company. Trust me when I say this is not a “sexy”, fun subject and every year it gets harder and harder to make it enticing when creating it. This year I decided to give them what they’ve wanted for a long time; which is the “death” of AML training. Okay, I didn’t really kill anyone or the training, but I did create a program that was like the game “Clue” where they had to solve the murder of “A. Mel Compliance”.
Once I had the concept for the program, it was time to decide how to embed the compliance content inside of the story/game using various books and papers, discussions, etc. found along the way during the investigation.
Like Clue, there can be several different outcomes as to who did it and with which weapon at the end of the program. To determine the killer and weapon, each time a person takes the training a series of variables is created. In the beginning of the program, learners are asked to select their gender and hair color; this helps create their personal avatar which is used throughout the program. Using the variables associated with these choices, along with some other selections they can make throughout the story, determines who killed the victim, A. Mel Compliance. There are 8 possible outcomes. I have 4 “killers” and 2 different ways they could have killed the victim (with a knife or a gun).
The most fun part of building this program was creating the various backgrounds and AML “articles” used throughout the program. I used PowerPoint for building these items. As you can see, a mixed medium of some cartoon backgrounds and characters (created in GoAnimate) were mixed with real photographs to give this an edgy movie-style feel.
Thanks to the “Rapid eLearning Blog” by Tom Kuhlmann, I have learned a lot of pointers for using PowerPoint for graphics work and here is how I used some of the things I learned to create my backgrounds.
For the image of the two agents driving to the murder scene part of the picture created with GoAnimate was made transparent (removed the background of that part of the picture) and then set it on top of a photo of a city street. This gives the illusion of them driving down the street.
For a lot of the other backgrounds, shapes were created and filled with brick patterns for building walls that create alleyways, cement patterns to create sidewalks, etc. I also manipulated the angles of several of the shapes to project a 3D appearance and make the learner feel like they are standing in the alley. To do this, use the 3D Rotation feature found in PowerPoint under Picture Tools/Format to angle the side walls and create the 3D effect.
Another fun effect created was the illusion of windows allowing the learner to look into or out of a building. To create the illusion of looking into a store’s window, take a square shape and work with the transparency of the shape so that you can see through it to whatever you put beneath it on the slide.
By doing this , it created some depth and realism to the various scenes within the story line of the program. I also created shadows behind characters in the program to give the scenes more of a 3-D feel. You can do this by using the Picture Effects/Shadow and then Perspective depending upon where you decide the light source wiil be in each scene.
Throughout the program the students still got their AML content that they needed to know for our yearly exam, mostly through clues and “reminders” that A. Mel Compliance gave to people during the course of his days prior to being killed. Because it was presented in a fun story-type manner, students didn’t even realize that they were reviewing the same old AML policies and procedures.
Now it is safe again to walk the halls because instead of getting glares of hatred over the yearly compliance training, I am getting applause and thumbs up instead. Now onto figuring out how to save next year’s training!
