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Lessons in Compliance
In a recent edition of Lawyers Weekly, (Issue 187: Friday 16 April 2004), Mickey Clark, Managing Director of The Learning Group, spoke to Features Writer, Francis Wilkins, about compliance training issues and CLE (Continuing Legal Education).
Click here to read the complete article.
Below is a section from the article in which Mickey spoke with Francis about online compliance training for clients...
"...Mickey Clark, Managing Director of The Learning Group, a multimedia software development company, said that while educating lawyers and companies about compliance is essential, a new approach to providing that education is necessary. “We feel that regulatory and values training will be an important area in continuing legal education,” Clark said. “Because this type of training is considered critical awareness training, we feel that current learning models – either instructor-led or e-learning – are too dependent on the ‘take it once’ approach and do not really engender behavioural changes in employees and managers. Rather, it’s: ‘Take the course; remember a bit of it – and forget it a week later’.”
The Learning Group plans to replace this approach with what it calls ‘interval training’ – using brief training sessions at intervals rather than a single course – with an online compliance training package set to be rolled out early next year. “[With interval training], instead of training an organisation once a year, for example, we will allow them to do a little training but more often,” Clark explained. “It’s training that doesn’t appear to be training,” he added.
The package will let a company email case studies, quizzes, surveys and alerts to its staff. Automated reminders and follow-ups can subsequently be sent to staff that have not yet completed the required training. In keeping with the ‘little but often’ approach, staff might be asked to comment on relevant current affairs – for example, they could be asked to outline the most significant corporate governance questions raised by the recent National Australia Bank scandal.
Alternatively, a company might want to arrange a 20-minute session on privacy issues using typical workplace scenarios. After answering questions on, for example, what they would do in a given situation, staff might receive a 10-minute quiz three months later and a 10-minute interactive case study in another three months. The package allows the company to schedule feedback on answers in addition to reminders and thus get a feel for the level of understanding for the topic being addressed.
“We have created the concept of interval training to rectify [the ‘take the course’ once] problem,” said Clark, “and to better ensure that companies who want their employees and managers to align their behaviours to reflect regulatory requirements, as well as corporate values, can do so.”
According to The Learning Group, learners using conventional training models generally have a single experience in which they learn, interact, apply, review and usually pass an assessment – with the training then over until the next course. Basic adult learning principles hold, however, that the more often the learner encounters the material to be learned, the more likely they are to remember it, especially if the learning sessions or events are spread out regularly over time.
In its compliance package, the company is considering covering the development of the ‘Big Four’ accountancy firms, financial reform, corporate governance, Sarbanes-Oxley and international accounting standards, as well as business codes of ethics and codes of conduct. These areas will “qualify for most professional certificates of training, and will meet continuing education criteria”, The Learning Group said, although Clark added that it was still too early to discuss the program’s contribution to CLE points requirements with the law societies..."
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