Companies are learning that compliance training from platforms like True Office Learning is crucial to the company’s success. However, the modern workplace now presents a ton of demands on our time. Employees will need to attend meetings, take phone calls, and answer emails, apart from doing their own jobs.
Because of that, it can affect the time employees and employers have for compliance training courses like cybersecurity learning, anti-harassment, and the like. Not only is time against our odds, but the ability to concentrate as well.
So, it begs employers and compliance departments to ask, how long should compliance training be? More importantly, is it possible to make it as short as possible without hindering the content and lessons part of the training?
Read on to find out!
How Short Can Compliance Training Be?
Based on research, the ideal duration for compliance training courses should be 20-25 minutes long!
Yes, one compliance training course or session shouldn’t take hours on end or an entire workday. And you’ll be surprised with the benefits shorter compliance training courses offer.
- Focus
It’s becoming more and more difficult for people to maintain focus for more extended periods. When you design training courses for 25 minutes or less, you help employees retain critical information. Longer courses can end up having people miss out on important information due to fading focus.
- Retention
When you maintain shorter course durations, you can break up large subject areas into closely-related and more manageable chunks. This allows better and longer-term information retention.
- Easier Access
Short bursts of training courses are actually more impactful than longer ones. It allows employees to go through topics without wading through broad, lengthy courses just to find specific lessons or bits of information.
- Learning On-the-Go
Besides in-person training courses, employers must also conduct online training courses to be completed on smartphones or other gadgets. Keep the in-person training sessions less than 25 minutes while employees can take short courses on their gadgets during downtime or when convenient for them.
Here are other tips to help keep compliance training short yet impactful:
- Include interactions every 60 seconds or so to keep learners engaged. You can ask multiple-choice questions or analyze scenarios to answer open-ended questions.
- Videos should not go beyond 90 seconds to prevent learners from losing focus. 90 seconds is a suitable duration, allowing employees to learn concepts completely and sticking to the main point.
- Topics should stay about 5 minutes long. While 25 minutes may seem short for compliance courses, it might actually be too long for busy employees. That’s why you’ll want to consider micro-learning, which delivers bite-sized topics that are about 5 minutes long to fit in longer courses. This prevents information overload and helps employees learn more efficiently.
Wrapping It Up
The “under 25-minute” recommendation is merely a rule of thumb. We recommend keeping it to this duration but always make sure that you provide all informative content engagingly.
