How to engage learners in highly legislated and mandated learning

As we all know, Health & Safety training has always been a central topic for organisation eLearning programmes due to scale, compliance audit, and periodic refresher requirements.

From our perspective as an eLearning aggregator, the importance of this subject domain is evidenced through volume of Health & Safety content that we now deliver. We currently have safety compliance content from at least 20 different course publishers offering depth, breadth, and choice for essential staff training.

Of course, Health & Safety education is very highly regulated and legislated across the globe and I was curious to learn more about how publishers and instructional designers in this field can navigate all the necessary controls and directives and yet still deliver engaging and effective learning? I approached Paul Boyes, Managing Director of Intellelearn who specialist in Health & Safety education to ask his views on this subject.

I asked Paul what he thinks makes for an impactful eLearning course focused on safety critical subjects, and his approach highlights five key aspects which are threaded through the Intellelearn approach.

1. Progression

‘We are constantly battling the quest of making impactful and successful eLearning courses for safety-critical and compliance-based subjects, and let’s be honest that this subject matter can get somewhat boring if handled carelessly! We believe that learner progression is a key factor here. This helps to encourage learners along their development curve and ensures their achievements are recognised within their learning journey’.

I was interested to hear how the most successful Intellelearn clients are putting this into practice and what they are doing to achieve a successful outcome?

‘This focus on progression has certainly been a major influencing factor for a number of our most successful clients. We have worked with many learners taking them from a level 1 to a Level 2 standard, and then six-to-twelve months later, onto the Level 3 supervisory level, IOSH courses, etc. These clients have positioned people development as a means of promoting the right people to the right roles and our eLearning courses have been used as part of a blended learning approach in these situations’.

2. Consistency

‘There is a significant increase in the consistency of the learning when it is delivered through an online course as compared to other forms of education. Each learner is reading and viewing exactly the same content. This is particularly important with a multi-site operation and where there is a required compliance outcome. In addition to the benefit of all learners having the same experience within a single course, we endeavour to ensure that the suite of courses carries a broadly uniform approach (so that the courses can be used in combination; essentially as building blocks for a programme of training)’.

3. Flexibility

‘I think one of the key benefits of eLearning for both the employer and the learner is its flexibility in terms of how it is used and consumed. Operating under the numerous forms of ‘lockdown’ during COVID, our key clients have needed flexibility in their training delivery. Some of their employees have been on furlough and others have been working flat-out. They have all needed the flexibility that online training provides to maximise both learning and maintaining operational performance. In addition to the inherent “eLearning flexibility”, we design our content to put the learner in control whilst also delivering the requisite learning outcomes. This balance is key‘.

4. Accountability

‘Through whichever LMS the customer is using, it is an easy and quick process to check where the course users are on their learner journey. The courses are designed with tracking in mind, and this is equally important in ensuring they all complete their compliance training in a timely manner’.

5. Speed

‘eLearning provides massive advantages in having content ready instantly, and learners can complete their training in two or even three times the speed of classroom courses. Learners also appreciate a well-paced course that cuts to the chase and delivers critical knowledge without wasting time. The learning segments and interactions have to be carefully curated for maximum impact.’

‘One of our key clients, a major brewer within the UK, has used the disruption caused by the COVID pandemic to totally upgrade the Health and Safety knowledge of the entire work force. The use of our eLearning courses has been essential in providing all the employees, whether on furlough or not, with a consistent and linear training journey from Health and Safety Level 1 to IOSH Managing Safely for 43 managers. The feedback from both the client and the individual learners has been incredible with nothing but 5 Star praise.’

Finally, I asked Paul what we can look forward to over the next twelve months from Intellelearn,

‘We will continue to develop courses to promote the progression of learners and plan to launch a Nebosh General Certificate course in the summer 2021. Our team is working on a series of shorter, byte-sized modules to supplement the longer accredited courses. This multi-layered approach to training will continue to be our strategy going forward.’

If you would like to see the Intellelearn approach in action you can explore their course catalogue here.

Also do remember, that we can deliver any of their courses through your internal LMS, or we can provide you with a dedicated and branded version of our Course-Source LMS, if preferred.

You can also search our comprehensive multi-publisher catalogue offering a huge range of microlearning and longer courses here.