We all have used the phrase, we will cross that bridge when we get there, but what happens when you get there and you don’t have a strategy in place to get across the bridge. Or, what if there is no bridge at all?
Learning and development teams within highly-regulated and compliance-driven industries have unique challenges when it comes to developing and delivering content.
If regulated and compliance-driven training is not distributed to learners correctly and in the appropriate timeframe, it can be extremely problematic. Having a strategy in place to be able to efficiently build, maintain, and distribute regulated and compliance training content is imperative.
Is Your Bridge Still Under Construction?
Common Content Challenges for Compliance and Regulated Industries
Highly-regulated and compliance-driven industries present a variety of pervasive obstacles to learning and development teams.
Here are a few of the most common:
- Content built in multiple systems and various formats and versions (Word, PowerPoint, Captivate, Storyline). Regulation and compliance content often changes faster than it can even be authored and published, so if content is built in various systems or tools, it becomes very challenging to make edits efficiently, significantly increasing the risk of distributing inconsistent or outdated content.
- Inability to effectively personalize content for different audiences without creating a maintenance nightmare. Many times, the content used in regulation and compliance learning needs to be delivered to various groups such as employees, contracted staff, field engineers, front-line staff, customers, etc. For these different audiences, there are also multiple generations of workers who learn differently and might need special accommodations. But because there is an excess of content and it usually changes rapidly, personalization can quickly become overwhelming from a content maintenance perspective.
- Distribution challenges associated with getting your content to your learners where and when they need it. Field engineers and front-line staff are at the root of this challenge as they typically seek out performance support,just-in-time training and microlearning at the moment of need in the field.
- Lack of audit support and limited visibility into content consumption and version history. Regulation and compliance training content must be audited regularly and having visibility into your content (full version history, last modified date and by whom, etc.) and the ability to easily generate audit-friendly print versions significantly simplifies and speeds up the process.
Do any of these challenges sound familiar? These are issues that most learning and development teams face, but in a regulated or compliance driven industry, the challenges are amplified. The graphic below illustrates how quickly your content can get out of control.
Do You Know Where your Bridge is Starting to Crack?
Goals for Content Optimization
Knowing the source of your pain points will help you develop the best compliance training strategy for not only where you need to go, but how best to get there (that is, what type of bridge you need to build). We asked several organizations in highly-regulated industries to share the primary improvements they’d like to see in their compliance content development and distribution processes.
Here are the top three goals they shared:
- Centralize and streamline all content. By having all content in one place and creating a single source of truth and a single place to make updates, course development time would go from weeks to hours, which would help tremendously when new regulations are released, and content needs to be updated. This would provide significant time and cost savings for learning and development department.
- Reuse content effectively to personalize and scale, and easily publish to multiple outputs. Regulated organizations would love to be able to easily personalize their content for each unique audience, whether by role, region, or capability. Personalization at scale allows learning and development teams to better accommodate various learning styles, audiences and preferences, while delivering the exact learning content needed (without any irrelevant information).
- Distribute training where the audiences are, in order to help provide the training they need, when they need it. Learning audiences aren’t typically sitting at a desk in front of their computer, they are in the field and need to be able to access learning and performance support on the go. Having the right delivery platform can help distribute training effectively in various forms to a variety of devices such as web, print, and mobile.
Let’s Build That Bridge Together
Xyleme Is Here to Help!
Xyleme’s learning content management system (LCMS) is designed to help organizations with complex learning content challenges make authoring, publishing, delivering, managing, and analyzing their learning content significantly easier.
Xyleme offers compliance training solutions that specialize in helping learning and development teams reimagine the way they create and distribute learning, so they can:
- Cut wasted time by centralizing content and using templates. Spend less time on process and fussing with formatting, allowing more time to author courses collaboratively.
- Unlock content and produce multiple versions easily. Free proprietary content from incompatible formats. Author once in XML and publish to any web, print, or mobile format.
- Deliver a better experience through personalization and delivering content in the flow of work. Making existing content bite-sized and searchable allows organizations to provide effective personalization at scale and makes it easy for learners (and authors) to quickly find the exact content they need, without having to wade (or scroll) through irrelevant information.
“Xyleme allows us to reuse topics, which is critical for our regulated industry. Engineering procedures and regulations are changing all the time, and we have to be up to date with all of our content all the time. It was next to impossible to maintain previously as we have it hosted in multiple platforms. With Xyleme it is in one place and we can now make changes quickly.”
Andy Antoniou | Technical Training Manager at Union Gas
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