By Mark Dorosz
VP of Compliance Learning, Interactive Services
One of the most important parts of making a good compliance training is creating a unique, appealing training that appeals to your staff. A training that really stands out will help your employees enjoy and look forward to future training. One way to delight your employees is to create a training that employs Adult Learning Theory.
Created by the late Michael Knowles, an educator, Knowles discovered special methods to engage adults in the learning process. According to Knowles, adult learners:
- Want to be actively involved in creating and evaluating their learning.
- Like to learn practical information that solves problems and they can immediately apply.
- Prefer to learn from experiences rather than listening.
Adult learning theory reminds us that our employees are busy professionals who like their learning to be quick, practical, and easily applicable to the workplace. Make your compliance training appeal to your workers by using the following methods:
- Get feedback from your staff. Adults, more than traditional younger learners, appreciate being able to tell you what works, or doesn’t work, in helping them learn. Before creating a compliance training, talk to your staff or send around an online survey asking about how they prefer to learn. Take the feedback into account to customize their experience.
- Create a training that uses a variety of practical learning tools. Most adult workers prefer interactive and practical learning to passively listening to content for long periods. Give your employees a variety to do during the training. Enrich the content-focused portions by using video and audio tools, and giving workers fill-in-the-blank papers to fill out at they listen. Allow workers to spend most of the time applying and making connections through group or individual simulations, engaging activities and games to check learning, and allowing your workers to move around regularly.
- Respect the time of your workers. Your employees work hard to get their jobs done. Creating a compliance training that helps them learn and apply concepts as quickly as possible will show you respect their time, and trust their ability to learn. Speed up the training and move quickly between a variety activities to maintain their maximum engagement.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Make Your Compliance Training Shine Using Adult Learning Theory” quote=”Make Your Compliance Training Shine Using Adult Learning Theory” theme=”style3″]
Mark Dorosz has written and spoken extensively on learning, compliance and ethics in forums such as CLO Magazine, Training Week and Compliance & Ethics Professional. For the past 15 years he has helped multi-nationals in the US, Europe and Asia build a culture of compliance through learning. In 2014, he won a Brandon Hall Gold Award for his work with Tiffany & Co. Mark is currently a VP of Compliance Learning with Interactive Services; he can be reached at mdorosz@interactiveservices.com or +1 (212) 376-5780.