E-learning and LMS blog articles

Most organisations, regardless of size or sector, must comply with mandatory regulations set by industry bodies. Failing to meet these compliance standards can lead to costly penalties and serious risks. That’s why effective compliance training is critical.

Modern learning platforms (LMSs) ensure regulatory compliance through centralised training management, automated updates and notifications, robust tracking and reporting, and seamless integration with other business systems. These features help organisations stay ahead of evolving regulations, monitor employee progress accurately, and streamline the audit process, making compliance training more efficient and reliable.

In this post, we’ll explore what compliance training is and how an LMS can help you deliver better, more measurable results.

TL;DR – Compliance training with an LMS: Key takeaways

• Compliance training ensures employees follow legal, regulatory, and internal company policies, essential for avoiding risk and costly penalties.

• A Learning Management System (LMS) streamlines compliance by automating enrolments, tracking completions, and ensuring standardised content delivery.

• LMS platforms support time-sensitive compliance with instant notifications, deadlines, and reminders, keeping your teams up to date.

• Powerful reporting tools generate audit-ready records, highlight gaps, and reduce the risk of non-compliance.

• Boost engagement with interactive content like gamification, badges, and branching scenarios to improve knowledge retention.

• Cost-effective and scalable, LMS platforms allow employees to complete training anytime, anywhere, minimising disruptions and maximising ROI.

What is compliance training?

Compliance training educates employees about the legal, regulatory, and company-specific policies they must follow. Unlike general employee development or role-based training, compliance training focuses on mandatory rules designed to protect the organisation and its workforce, such as health and safety protocols, data privacy laws, or industry regulations.

Most compliance training is a necessary step towards implementing preventative measures which serve to protect both employees and employers from potential issues, such as accidents in the workplace or illegal data sharing.

Because compliance needs often vary by department or role, for example, a team working in a warehouse may require different compliance training from teams working in an office. It can be logistically challenging, therefore, to ensure regulatory compliance is being met across the board. That's where an LMS becomes essential.

What is an LMS?

A Learning Management System (LMS) is a digital learning platform used to manage and measure e-learning and online training. An LMS unites all the elements required to deliver a learning and development programme, including course content creation, training, assessment and reporting.

For more information on LMSs, read our comprehensive guide.

Ensure full compliance across your organisation

If compliance training is delivered manually, it can be difficult to make sure that each employee has completed their training, particularly with a dispersed workforce scattered across various departments or locations. Manually delivered compliance training is also vulnerable to human error, which can lead to costly mistakes – for example, an employee may be missed, outdated content delivered, or paperwork lost.

When using an LMS, administrators can automatically enrol employees in mandated training programmes and assign relevant courses. Not only does this save administrators a great deal of time, but it also reduces the risk of employees being missed out – ensuring full compliance across the entirety of the company. With an LMS such as Totara Learn, the hierarchies feature allows admins to replicate the organisational structure of the business or organisation meaning employees can be organised by department, location, job role etc. Using this feature, admins can assign compliance training automatically without having to assign it to each employee individually, once again reducing the risk of missing an employee out.

Time-sensitive compliance training made simple

Compliance training can often be time sensitive as regulatory bodies may distribute new regulatory requirements with a short turn-around time for delivering proof of training. Using an LMS makes it easier for administrators to quickly distribute new compliance training content and notification features ensure employees are notified as soon as they have been enrolled. New courses can also be sent out with a completion deadline along with reminder notifications, ensuring that all employees complete training in time to meet regulatory compliance deadlines.

Powerful reporting and audit trails for compliance

Once employees have been enrolled in courses, L&D admins can track completions along with assessment pass or fail rates; these insights can be gathered through reporting data and analytics features. An LMS will typically feature a report builder capable of sourcing data from a number of areas such as departments or specific lessons. Automated reporting tools can create audit trails, highlighting those who are yet to complete training – saving time spent on manual processes and reducing the risk of non-compliance.

Maintaining a high standard of compliance training with LMS content

LMS courses can be delivered in a standardised format, and access permissions limit editing rights, ensuring that only nominated administrators or subject matter experts are able to make course adjustments, ensuring only accurate regulatory information is included. When relying on face-to-face teaching, there is a risk that vital information could be omitted or incorrectly conveyed, resulting in costly mistakes further down the line.

Alternatively, when compliance training is delivered via paper documents or digital documents that aren’t shared through online platforms, it can be difficult to manage and modify the content and with old versions of training documents available to anyone who finds it, employees could complete outdated training by mistake. With an LMS, content can be modified directly in the platform, ensuring all documents are up to date with no risk of copies of older versions floating about in the system.

Boost engagement and retention with interactive training

Asking employees to complete compliance training sessions can be a challenge in itself, but asking them to engage with the content and retain the information they’re being taught poses a greater barrier. It can be difficult to motivate employees as the subject matter associated with compliance training is often formal in nature. However, an LMS makes it easier to create interactive and engaging content regardless of the subject matter.

Using an LMS, admins may choose to make compliance courses more engaging using gamified lessons. Gamification has proven to increase engagement levels and lesson types such as branching scenarios are well suited to certain areas of compliance training as they ask learners to work their way through a scenario using critical thinking skills. Admins can also introduce some healthy competition into course completion by offering badges or including leader boards – encouraging employees to complete training and ensuring full compliance as a result.

Cost-effective compliance training, anywhere, anytime

When compliance training is delivered without the help of an LMS, it may be delivered through face-to-face training sessions. Holding in-person training sessions often means gathering whole teams or departments together in the same room at the same time which can be expensive and logistically difficult to manage. However, an LMS makes training more cost-effective as employees can learn anywhere at any time that suits them – meaning organisers don’t need to find a date and time that works for everyone. This also means that entire teams or departments needn’t ‘shut down’ during compliance training sessions as learning can be staggered.

Ready to enhance your compliance training with an LMS?

L&D professionals across all sectors are already using LMS software to successfully deliver compliance training. For more information on how one of our e-learning platforms can help you achieve full regulatory compliance, read our use case information here.

For further insights into how our clients are using their LMS for compliance training and more, read our case studies here.