Mandatory training isn’t a box to check or a necessary hurdle. It’s an opportunity to strengthen your learning and development program.
You can use a mandatory training program to protect your organization and your workers. You can even include custom content to develop skills that’ll positively impact your company’s strategic goals. In this guide, we’ll show you how to make mandatory training a meaningful part of your learning strategy.
What is mandatory training?
Let’s start with a definition. Mandatory training is any learning program that an organization requires a defined group to complete. That organization could be your own company, an external agency, or a governmental body. The defined group could be a whole category, like ‘employee,’ ‘partner,’ ‘customer,’ or individual job types.
Traditionally, these programs have focused on critical requirements, such as safety protocols or legal compliance. And by definition, completing training is a condition of employment or required for the employer to remain in good standing with regulatory agencies. Failure to fulfill mandatory training requirements can lead to disciplinary actions, fines, dismissal, or other consequences.
Developing a formal, mandatory training program offers several key advantages, especially if your organization is handling it ad hoc today.
- Ensure policy awareness: Mandatory courses on corporate policies ensure documentation that all employees understand company policies, operational procedures, and legal obligations.
- Mitigate legal risks: By informing employees of all essential rights, responsibilities, and requirements, you'll better protect your organization against legal liabilities.
- Enhance safety and prevent accidents: You’ll educate employees about potential workplace hazards, which will help create a safer environment and reduce the likelihood of accidents and injuries.
- Promote effective and compliant job performance: It helps ensure that all employees perform their duties safely and effectively, meet established standards, and adhere to all relevant regulations.
Who needs mandatory training?
Mandatory training is typically assigned to employees based on their role and department.
- Safety training: To prevent workplace accidents, you should cover topics like fire safety, emergency procedures, and the safe use of equipment.
- Compliance training: Regardless of job type, all employees must complete legal and regulatory requirements, such as anti-harassment, data privacy, and ethical conduct.
- Job-specific skills training: Ensuring employees have the foundational skills to perform their roles effectively and safely, particularly in regulated industries like healthcare or aviation.
But it’s not necessarily limited to just employees. Required learning can extend to various stakeholders connected to an organization.
Mandatory training for customers
In certain situations, you may need to require customers to complete training.
- Safety briefings: Before participating in activities with inherent risks, such as using specialized rental equipment, amusement park rides, or adventure sports.
- Product usage training: For complex or potentially hazardous products, ensuring customers understand safe and correct operation to prevent injury or misuse.
- Compliance with regulations: In some industries, such as financial services, customers may need to complete training on anti-money laundering or other regulatory requirements based on the financial resources available to them.
Mandatory training for partners
If you work with external partners who have access to corporate resources, you may require them to receive training in compliance or simply alignment with strategy.
- Security protocols: Training on data security and access procedures for partners who interact with sensitive company information.
- Brand guidelines and compliance: Ensure partners and contract employees adhere to brand standards and any relevant legal or ethical guidelines.
- Product knowledge: Especially if you work with external sales or reseller partners, you should implement mandatory training on product features and appropriate representation.
Mandatory training for suppliers
As your suppliers provide materials used within your organization, you might also want them to complete mandatory training to ensure they meet certain standards.
- Quality standards and compliance: This one is self-explanatory. Any quality control standards you need to meet in your products often apply to the suppliers who deliver raw materials.
- Safety and handling procedures: For suppliers of hazardous materials or those with workers on-site, mandatory courses on safe handling and operational protocols within your facility can protect everyone involved.
What to include in mandated training
Depending on your business sector, governments or industry groups may set different training requirements.
Workplace safety
These often apply across various industries to ensure basic workplace standards. In the US, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) mandates that all businesses carry out training on workplace safety procedures, including:
- Hazard communication
- Emergency Action Plans (EAPs)
- First aid
- Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)
Data & privacy
Depending on your jurisdiction, you may be mandated to follow privacy regulations. Training content can include writing secure code to avoid vulnerabilities, understanding different types of cyber threats, or simply knowing how to handle personal and sensitive information correctly. Rules such as GDPR in Europe and CCPA in California are some of the most commonly encountered regulations.
Industry-specific training requirements
Most business sectors face risks unique to them, which necessitate tailored training. We won't cover them all, but these are some of the most common in the US.
Healthcare
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA): Organizations handling Protected Health Information (PHI) must provide thorough and regularly updated training on HIPAA to all employees who may access patient data. This training covers both physical and network security measures.
Bloodborne pathogen training: OSHA requires healthcare workers to be trained in safely handling and disposing of materials that may contain bloodborne pathogens like HIV and hepatitis B and C.
Finance
Anti-Money Laundering (AML): Financial institutions are legally obligated under various international and national regulations to conduct AML training. In the US, this is regulated by FINRA, a nonprofit organization that regulates individuals involved in securities trading.
State-specific training
Many states have their own specific mandatory staff training requirements for various industries. Here are some examples:
- California: We already mentioned CCPA. California also requires sexual harassment prevention training for supervisors every two years and for all other employees every three years for employers with five or more employees.
- New York: Mandates annual sexual harassment prevention training for all employers, regardless of size.
- Massachusetts: Like many states, Massachusetts requires mandatory reporter training requirements for employees in certain roles.
Want to explore how a modern LMS can help you optimize your mandatory training programs? Contribute to a more skilled and compliant workforce by watching our webinar: Mastering enterprise learning: The power of strategic learning systems
More than compliance—mandatory training can improve business outcomes
You’d be forgiven for thinking a mandatory training program is about simply compliance and risk mitigation. Those are core functions, of course, but you can use a mandatory training program to support so much more.
For example, they can play a broader role in supporting the strategic outcomes your business aims for.
Developing foundational capabilities
Suppose you want to establish a baseline level of knowledge and competency across the organization in topics such as safety, ethics, and technical procedures. In that case, you can incorporate all these topics into a mandatory training program. If you want to build a strong L&D program, this type of mandatory training is an excellent way to ensure a broad, foundational understanding that’ll underpin your other learning and development initiatives.
Reinforcing company values and culture
Maintaining consistent core values and ethical standards can be challenging in any organization, especially when employees are distributed or working remotely. Mandating engagement with these concepts during training can help you establish standards for expected behaviors and the type of values-based culture you want within your organization.
Building a strong employer brand
A strong training program can help you stand out among job seekers. If you can publicly demonstrate a dedication to safety, compliance, and ethical conduct, that can help attract talent who value these principles.
Cultivating versatility through cross-functional training
Cross-functional training encourages employees to learn skills that extend beyond their primary roles. It can help the workforce better adapt to changing needs and collaborate more effectively across departments. For example, a marketing team member might learn basic sales techniques to better understand customer interactions. Or an engineer can learn customer support to gain firsthand insights into user challenges.
Empowering everyone with a customer-centric mindset
Even for employees in non-client-facing roles, mandating basic customer service or customer journey training can yield significant benefits. When individuals in departments such as product development, finance, or IT understand the customer experience and the impact of their work on the end-user, it can lead to more customer-centric decisions and an improvement in quality. For instance, this may require product developers to participate in sessions where they receive direct customer feedback.
Time your mandatory training for maximum impact
Mandatory training at onboarding is important, but it’s best viewed as an ongoing process that you want triggered at various points:
- Initial onboarding: You should conduct mandatory courses when employees join the company or transition to a new department. This will provide the foundational knowledge and skills required for their roles, including familiarization with tools, equipment, and basic job functions.
- Regular refreshers and updates: Schedule regular, mandatory refresher sessions to combat knowledge decay. This is most relevant for topics like safety protocols, compliance regulations, and industry best practices. Set a schedule that makes sense based on your risk profile for non-compliance on each topic.
- Policy and process changes: Any significant updates to company policies, procedures, or the introduction of new products should trigger a new round of training.
Measuring mandatory training effectiveness and ROI
The Kirkpatrick Model is perhaps the most recognized framework for measuring the effectiveness of a training program, which you may already be familiar with. Here's how to apply it to mandatory training, with examples of ROI where applicable:
Level 1: Reaction—learner engagement
- What it measures: How favorably participants reacted to the training. Was it engaging? Relevant? An effective use of their time?
- How to measure: Post-training surveys focusing on the learner's experience, content clarity, instructor effectiveness, and perceived relevance to their job.
ROI is harder to gauge at this level, but you can infer some indirect value. Most notably, positive reactions can lead to increased participation in future training, which can foster a culture of learning. In this culture, staff are willing to invest effort in improving themselves, increasing productivity and performance.
Level 2: Learning—knowledge and skill acquisition
- What it measures: The extent to which participants acquired the intended knowledge, skills, attitudes, confidence, and commitment.
- How to measure: Pre- and post-training assessments (quizzes, tests, practical demonstrations) to measure knowledge gain. For example, before and after safety training, employees could take a quiz on safety procedures.
At this stage, you have measurable improvements in workforce performance, which will directly translate into productivity gains. For instance, improved scores on a data security quiz can correlate with a reduction in data breaches, saving the organization significant remediation costs.
Level 3: Behavior—application on the job
- What it measures: Whether participants apply what they learned in their daily work.
- How to measure: Observation of on-the-job performance, manager feedback, performance reviews, and self-assessment surveys conducted weeks or months after the training. For example, after anti-harassment training, managers can observe and report on any changes in team interactions.
Changing employee behavior directly impacts your bottom line. For example, a reduction in workplace accidents after mandatory safety training translates to fewer compensation claims, likely lower premiums, and, most importantly, fewer lost workdays.
Level 4: Results—impact on business outcomes
- What it measures: The direct impact of the training on organizational key performance indicators (KPIs) established before the training.
- How to measure: Tracking relevant business metrics such as reduced accident rates (safety training), improved compliance scores (ethics or regulatory training), decreased legal issues (harassment prevention), or increased efficiency (process training) over time. Isolating the impact of training can be challenging and may require analyzing trends and controlling for other influencing factors.
This level provides the clearest ROI. Changes in KPIs before and after training provide the clearest evidence that your mandatory training program has value to your organization.
How mandatory training fits into multi-dimensional learning
An effective L&D strategy blends various approaches. That includes mandatory training content but won’t be limited to it. Here's how you can integrate mandatory training with other key areas of enterprise learning:
Mandatory training: your foundation
While essential, mandatory staff training should still be streamlined and user-friendly. You don’t want new employees tuning out essential regulatory compliance content.
Performance enablement: targeted development
Performance enablement focuses on delivering the right skills at the right time to boost productivity and support career growth. An LMS facilitates personalized learning paths and role-specific training at scale.
Product training: empowering users and reducing support burden
Here, you equip customers with the knowledge to maximize the utility of your product so they’re most satisfied. You also train partners and employees with the knowledge to solve support issues efficiently. An LMS enables interactive tutorials and accessible resources for on-demand learning.
Training as a business: leveraging expertise for revenue
Learning can also be a direct revenue stream. Monetizing training for external audiences not only builds expertise but also generates income. An LMS provides a platform for creating and managing mandatory courses, certifications, and partner enablement programs.
Ready to make mandatory training a strategic asset?
Absorb LMS helps you turn mandatory training program into a more engaging, effective driver of productivity. It streamlines delivery, automates tracking, and gives you clear insights into learning outcomes.
The platform takes you beyond simply meeting regulatory requirements; instead, you drive performance.
