The three most important elements of any online training solution are content, content and content.  In an effort to capture the significant ROI that can come from deploying an online solution to environmental compliance or safety training requirements, companies will often apply a disproportionate amount of time, money and resources to the means by which to distribute the training at the expense of the training itself.  

More than ever, there are myriad options available to managers for assigning, tracking, reporting and record-keeping online environmental compliance and safety training activities.  Whether it’s a licensed learning management system (LMS); learning content management system (LCMS); part of a large corporate, enterprise resource planning system (ERP) like SAP™ or PeopleSoft™; or an enterprise, software as service, LMS like our own SafetySkills™ Learning Center, they all have their compelling features sets and value propositions.   Depending on the size and structure of your company, your current technology assets and legacy applications, and most importantly your budget, you may find one LMS is a better fit, over another.  The underlying technology these LMSs are based on is ever-changing, thus the next better, faster, cheaper LMSs is always just around the corner.    

However, no matter how robust the LMS, it is pointless if the training the LMS is managing is ineffective.  It is always frustrating to see a sophisticated, world-class [read: costly] learning management platform with all the bells and whistles, deploying static, sub-standard environmental compliance and safety training that is often little more than published PowerPoint presentations or re-hashed industrial safety training videos from the 80’s streamed online.

Regardless of how you plan to deploy your environmental compliance and safety training online it is critical that your content is both engaging and relevant to your learners.  Today’s generation of workers who have grown-up with MTV and the X-box are not going to be engaged and, thus not learn, from anything but the most dynamic environmental compliance and safety learning content.  There is no clever feature on any LMS that will outweigh the value of world-class learning content designed by innovative instructional systems designers, with high-levels of interactivity and rich studio-quality production.    

Another important factor that will determine the effectiveness of your online environmental compliance and safety training is relevance.  Overly generic safety training content, or even worse, specific learning content that is irrelevant to the learner is not only ineffective, but it can undermine your entire deployment.  For a successful program, companies must invest in learning content that addresses the learner’s specific environmental compliance and safety risks.  

Clearly, identifying specifically what your employees really need to know and then securing engaging, well designed learning content can be time consuming and expensive, but you will be building a durable asset with a much larger payoff than any conveniences that the latest, greatest LMS may offer.