It is imperative that high standards of reporting, and functionality within an LMS are achieved. Compliance is an aspect of your LMS that should never be overlooked. Members of your team rely on this system to ensure all records and policies are in place and that the information is accurate. Your LMS provides you and your team with the necessary audit trails that provide visibility into this information and review historical security and operational activity.
For a business to ensure they meet these standards and are compliant when they are under audit, simple measures need to be taken upon the development of your LMS. Some examples of this include:
· Accurate reporting and progression of users
· Visible assessment results
· Easily accessible feedback
This will help take the pressure off when this comes to auditing time! An LMS allows users to access their online training from a central repository. The LMS records this to ensure that this can be proven, regardless of the level. Ensuring the traceability, management and reporting of your training is crucial in preparing your LMS for a compliance audit. Below I will go through several tips to assist you in creating and building an LMS that is compliant and ‘audit ready’.
1. Training Progress & Completion Tracking
Your LMS should be interwoven with built-in reminders and prompts for users to ensure your completion rate reaches 100%. It is also vitally important that your online training is engaging in order to achieve this. If the content is engaging from the offset, your completion rates will reflect this. Completion reporting should visible and easily accessible to the compliance auditor for each training course – highlighting individual users and their results. The functionality of these reports needs to allow for viewing in a variety of cross sections and filters.
2. Version Control
Online training courses evidently will need to be updated over time. For example, onboarding training for new employees may change and develop as the organisation does. In this instance, although the basis of the course may remain the same, certain elements may need to be added or removed from the training course. A new ‘version’, of the training course must be put in place and registered as such. Compliance auditors wish to identify uniform version control, so it is vital that these updated training courses are visible.
3. Consistent & Uniform Training
It is certain that one of the first elements a compliance auditor will evaluate is the consistency of training. It is expected that the training that is delivered is identical for all employees across the same organisation. They will also venture further into this by ensuring that the online training is completed in an appropriate specified timeline. However, the compliance auditor will consider the different departments and their specific requirements for training. For example, a customer service team may require different training to a warehouse team.
4. Meticulous Assessments
Although your users must complete the training, you also need to ensure that they have reached the required skills standards. As I mentioned engaging content will assist with completion rates, but you must also ensure that your online assessments are appropriate in testing what the users have learned and retained from the online training. Keeping a copy of all certification is paramount for a compliance audit.
Sources