Out of nowhere, a regulator contacts you requesting immediate proof of every employee’s harassment training completion. Suddenly, your inbox is flooded with panicked requests for “the latest spreadsheet.” If this scenario feels uncomfortably familiar, you're not alone.
Regulatory audits and inspections rarely come with advance notice; they often occur unexpectedly and can vary significantly by industry. In recent surveys of risk and learning leaders, nearly 75% of them admit they can’t produce audit-ready reports on demand, even though a single willful OSHA violation now carries penalties of up to $165,000, and the reputational damage often far exceeds the financial hit.
Compliance reporting is too important to rely on a patchwork of duct-taped spreadsheets and frantic, late-night data hunts. While the cause of this can be traced to rapidly changing regulations and inconsistent data storage, people often treat training as an expense rather than a risk-mitigation tool. This combination typically leads to a perfect storm of blind spots, time pressure, and finger-pointing, exactly when the organization can least afford uncertainty.
The good news is that you can address every one of your pain points with a few smart process tweaks. In this article, we outline ten common challenges that learning and development teams face, along with practical ways to address them.
What are the general challenges of compliance reporting?
Compliance reporting should feel routine, but for most teams, it's a constant tug-of-war between rising expectations and outdated tools. This friction stems from a regulatory landscape evolving faster than systems can adapt, workflows still trapped in disconnected spreadsheets, and intensifying professional pressures. A recent survey highlights this tension, revealing that 92% of compliance leaders find their roles to be increasingly challenging due to heightened risks and scrutiny.
The complexity emerges clearly along two critical dimensions: the ever-widening scope of compliance requirements and the demanding standards of proof auditors require.
Key areas of compliance
Compliance is not a singular topic, but a complex web that impacts virtually every part of the business. Although specific rules vary by industry, most compliance frameworks span several essential operational domains, each with unique training and reporting needs:
- Workplace and HR compliance (e.g., anti-harassment, hiring practices)
- Health and safety compliance (e.g., OSHA standards)
- Data privacy and security compliance (e.g., GDPR, CCPA)
- Financial compliance (e.g., anti-corruption, Sarbanes-Oxley)
- Environmental compliance (e.g., sustainability, materials handling)
The seven elements of an effective program
To demonstrate effective management of these areas, organizations must adhere to rigorous standards outlined by regulators and auditors, specifically through the seven elements of an effective compliance program. This framework demands more than employee training—it requires clear documentation and ongoing verification of compliance measures through:
- Clear standards and procedures
- High-level oversight
- Careful delegation of authority
- Effective communication and training
- Robust monitoring and auditing
- Consistent enforcement
- Proactive response and prevention
At the intersection of these expansive compliance requirements and stringent proof standards lies the core challenge of compliance reporting. Teams must simultaneously track training programs across numerous compliance topics while gathering meticulous evidence to satisfy auditors' high expectations. This intersection—compounded by manual processes and fragmented data—is where the pain points emerge, driving reactive rather than proactive compliance management. Let's explore the ten specific pain points that arise from this challenging environment.
10 common compliance reporting challenges
1. Data is all over the place
Most compliance teams are still building reports from half a dozen systems, using human resources information system (HRIS) for head count, a legacy LMS for course completions, SharePoint for classroom sign‑offs, and, yes, spreadsheets for everything else. A 2025 study found that 90% of organizations still rely on spreadsheets to hold vital business data, a setup that all but guarantees duplicate records and audit-day blind spots.
With data scattered this way, a simple audit query like “Show me all anti-harassment training completions for the New York office” becomes a manual data-matching nightmare. Your team loses valuable time connecting employee IDs from one system to course codes in another, instead of focusing on what actually improves employee skills and reduces workplace risk.
Practical fixes
Rather than chasing down data, you can make the data come to you. The goal is to create a reliable, central hub for all training records that works automatically. Here’s how:
Connect your learning platform to your people data:
By linking your LMS directly to your HRIS, the system can automatically update training needs whenever an employee changes roles, moves to a new location, or leaves the company. This ends the manual work of keeping two systems in sync.
Bring all training records into one place:
Use API integrations to automatically import records from external sources, such as certificates from third-party vendors or attendance records from virtual classrooms, which finally closes the frustrating “I did the course, but it’s not in the system” gap for good.
Give every employee a single, unified transcript:
When these systems sync automatically each night, you eliminate duplicate records, which means that when an auditor asks for proof, you can instantly provide a training history for any employee, tied back to a single record.
When you control your data, every other compliance challenge becomes simpler to solve—or disappears entirely. Absorb LMS provides seamless API integrations to connect your HRIS and other systems, centralizing records and delivering audit-ready reports on demand.
2. Spreadsheets slow down the process
As stated earlier, nearly all organizations still rely on spreadsheets for critical compliance data, yet everyone admits these files slow them down and heighten risk. Spreadsheets may feel familiar, but they are fundamentally disconnected from the live, dynamic nature of a modern workforce.
This disconnect creates several points of friction, with the most obvious being version-control chaos. When a report is needed, team members start emailing files back and forth (Q3_Compliance_v2_FINAL.xlsx, Q3_Compliance_v3_Susan_Edits.xlsx) until no one is sure which document is the real source of truth. As a result, hours are wasted just trying to find and consolidate the correct information before the real work even begins.
Then there’s the sheer manual effort involved. Every time a learner completes a new training session, someone must open the master file, locate the correct names on the list, and manually enter the completion dates. This tedious process is highly susceptible to human error. Updating the wrong "David Smith" or misspelling a course name can lead to inaccurate reports that undermine the entire compliance effort.
This static nature means you have zero real-time visibility, and if an auditor asks for a current snapshot of the company's compliance status, you can't provide an immediate answer. You have to track down the latest data and manually calculate the results, which might cause you to miss the deadline. Relying on a spreadsheet can turn routine requests into time-consuming projects, a problem that becomes critical when you’re racing to meet an auditor’s deadline.
Practical fixes
The solution is to replace the static spreadsheet with a dynamic, automated system, which shifts your team’s focus from manually compiling data to strategically acting on it. Here’s how:
Automated reporting and scheduling:
Instead of you scrambling for a screen grab five minutes before a meeting, set your learning system to automatically email department heads a fresh "overdue learners" snapshot every Monday morning. The right information gets to the right people, without you lifting a finger.
Reusable report templates for recurring needs:
For recurring needs, such as annual harassment training summaries or quarterly board updates, build a reusable template once. Now, instead of manually formatting a spreadsheet each time, you can export a consistent, audit-ready report with a single click, saving hours of tedious work.
Real‑time monitoring:
Provide managers with interactive dashboards that display their team’s live completion rates the moment they log in. This self-service approach provides managers with the necessary data, significantly reducing the need for back-and-forth emails and last-minute surprises for your team.
Replace the spreadsheet shuffle with automated insights. The result is a compliance cycle that's not only faster but fundamentally more reliable.
3. It’s unclear who’s behind on training
It’s 9 a.m. on a Tuesday, and HR is asked a seemingly simple question: “Which managers still need to complete this quarter’s compliance training refresher?” Answering it, however, is anything but simple. Clicking through the HRIS provides the current list of managers, while the LMS shows a raw list of course completions, after a manual export. Meanwhile, a separate spreadsheet attempts to track who is on extended leave, who just transferred in from another department, and which new hires are still on probation.
Instantly, the numbers don’t line up. Does the LMS completion list include the manager who just got promoted last week? Is the person on maternity leave currently exempt? A two-minute status check quickly drags into an afternoon of cross-referencing lists and making educated guesses.
This visibility gap is widespread and impacts everyone. Employees may not even realize they’re behind on a crucial certification until they receive an automated, and often impersonal, “past due” notification.
For managers, the problem is even worse; they want to support their teams but have no easy way to see who needs a helpful nudge before a deadline passes. This forces them to either bother their entire team with a generic reminder or add another email to HR’s already overloaded inbox.
The consequences are significant, with a study citing that only 16% of organizations felt their employees were “very effective” at accessing critical information with their current tools. When learners can’t easily see their deadlines and managers are unaware of who is falling behind, proactive follow-up becomes impossible. Instead, everyone remains stuck in a reactive cycle, where compliance feels less like a shared goal and more like a series of unpleasant, last-minute surprises.
Practical fixes
The goal is to transition from a reactive guessing game to a proactive system where employees, managers, and your team know exactly where they stand at all times. You can do this by letting your LMS do the heavy lifting.
Sync your LMS with core HR systems:
When you connect your learning platform directly to your HRIS, training requirements update automatically whenever an employee’s job title, department, or status changes. This eliminates the need for manual list-checking and prevents a promotion or transfer from causing someone to miss an important deadline.
Apply dynamic enrollment rules:
Instead of assigning courses by hand, create dynamic rules that do it for you. For example, a rule like “Assign the annual safety course to any employee tagged as a ‘manager’ in San Francisco” ensures that new hires and newly promoted employees receive the proper training from day one.
Give managers real-time dashboards:
Provide managers with a real-time, easy-to-understand dashboard of their team’s status. A simple “traffic light” view—green for compliant, amber for expiring soon, red for overdue—lets them see exactly who needs a helpful nudge, eliminating their need to constantly ask your team for reports.
Automated nudges for learners and leaders:
Stop chasing down individuals. You can set up scheduled, automated reminders for learners about upcoming deadlines and for managers about their team’s progress, keeping due dates at the forefront and reducing the endless “Have you finished it yet?” emails that clog everyone’s day.
With clear, current insight into who’s complete and who’s behind, compliance shifts from reactive firefighting to steady, on-track progress.
4. Poor real-time visibility creates an unseen risk
The last challenge focused on identifying who needs training. This one is about knowing the current status of your entire organization. When your data lives in static reports, your view of your company’s compliance posture is always a look in the rearview mirror. By the time you export a list, format it in Excel, and send it to a manager, the data might already be hours, if not days, old.
Such data lag prevents proactive compliance management; you can only react to what’s already happened. It’s impossible to spot negative trends as they develop—for instance, if one department consistently falls behind on a crucial safety certification. You only discover the problem long after it has become a significant risk.
For senior leaders and auditors, this lack of real-time visibility is a significant source of concern, which isn't a rare issue. A recent survey found that only 29% of organizations have a single source of truth for their risk data, leaving the vast majority to operate with a fragmented view.
In the event of a workplace incident or regulatory audit, a company without a unified system can't definitively prove its compliance status for that specific day or moment. It creates a critical blind spot where the business is forced to operate on outdated information, unable to accurately assess its risk level until the next report is manually compiled.
Practical fixes
The only way to close the visibility gap is to replace delayed, static reports with live, interactive data. The goal is to see and manage your compliance posture in the present moment, not in the past.
Surface at-risk learners instantly:
You can configure your LMS dashboard to immediately highlight the most critical information—the employees currently overdue and those with certifications expiring in the next 30, 60, or 90 days. Absorb LMS allows your team to stop digging for data and instead focus its energy where the compliance risk is highest.
Give every manager their compliance dashboard:
Empower your people leaders by giving them a dedicated manager view. Instead of waiting for your team to send a report, a manager can log in at any time and view the real-time compliance status of their direct reports. This self-service approach makes them accountable and transforms them from passive bystanders into active owners of their team’s training.
Use automated alerts as an early-warning system:
Instead of discovering problems after the fact, let the system send proactive warning signals. Automated notifications can alert learners and their managers when a due date is approaching, or a certification is about to expire. This turns the reactive clean-up of overdue training into a proactive effort to stay ahead.
Ultimately, solving the visibility problem means replacing delayed reports with immediate answers. While live dashboards are a crucial step, the next evolution is using AI to query data instantly. With Absorb Intelligent Assist, you can now skip reports entirely and get real-time visibility just by asking a question. This feature shifts compliance from a reactive reporting task into a proactive, real-time activity, eliminating the data lag that creates so much organizational risk.
See how Absorb Intelligent Assist works.
5. Lack of verifiable proof for audits
When a regulator requests proof of compliance, they expect more than a spreadsheet with checkmarks; they want a verifiable and trustworthy record of what training was completed, by whom, and when. Unfortunately, many programs struggle to meet this standard.
According to PwC’s 2025 Global Compliance Survey, just 48% of companies describe their compliance reporting as “higher-quality,” leaving the majority without the depth of evidence that auditors demand. In this environment, a simple 'complete' status in an LMS or a date in an Excel file often isn’t enough to pass scrutiny.
Auditors need to see the "digital paper trail." They might request the specific version of a course an employee completed a year ago, proof of attendance for an in-person session, or the actual certificate from an external vendor. Suppose this evidence is scattered across email inboxes, local hard drives, and different platforms. In that case, it’s nearly impossible to produce on demand, forcing teams to scramble, find, and assemble disparate pieces of information.
Furthermore, data that can be easily changed is immediately suspicious, as auditors know that individuals can edit a date in a spreadsheet moments before their visit. Without an immutable audit trail—a system log that shows who made changes and when—your data lacks the integrity required for a formal audit, forcing you to defend the validity of your records instead of confidently presenting them.
Practical fixes
The key to passing an audit with confidence is to have a system that not only stores completions but also creates an indisputable record of proof, ready to be presented at a moment's notice.
Capture a complete, timestamped history of every action:
A modern LMS should function as a system of record, automatically logging every relevant activity—from course versions to completion dates and linked certificates—to create a detailed, trustworthy history that stands up to scrutiny.
Build your reports to mirror the auditor's checklist:
Different regulators have different requirements. Instead of trying to reformat a generic data export during an audit, use a reporting tool that allows you to build and save custom templates. You can create specific reports formatted exactly as OSHA, the FAA, or any other regulatory body expects to see them, turning a high-stakes request into a simple one-click task.
Centralize and back up all forms of evidence:
Ensure that all proof, whether it’s a digital certificate, a scanned sign-in sheet, or a third-party credential, is uploaded and attached to the corresponding LMS training record. Creating a unified evidence repository with automated backups provides secure, long-term proof, even for former employees.
6. Every stakeholder wants a different report
The compliance team often feels like a short-order cook for data requests. On any given day, the queue is long, and the orders are specific:
- A department head wants a simple list of their direct reports who are overdue on safety training.
- The Chief Risk Officer (CRO) wants a high-level dashboard showing overall compliance percentages, trended by quarter.
- An external auditor provides a specific checklist and needs to see all anti-bribery course completions for the entire sales team from the last fiscal year.
Each of these requests is reasonable, but fulfilling them with a one-size-fits-all data export is impossible. A raw data dump from the LMS is too granular for the CRO and incorrectly formatted for the auditor. As a result, the learning and development (L&D) team is forced to manually filter, pivot, and reformat spreadsheets for every single request.
The scale of this time sink is significant. A recent industry survey found that 40% of compliance teams spend at least four hours every week creating or amending reports for the board alone. This turns the compliance process into a reactive report factory, where the majority of time is spent manipulating data instead of improving the training programs that drive compliance.
Practical fixes
Rather than building every report from scratch, the solution is to create a flexible, scalable reporting system that can deliver the right level of detail to the right person, often automatically.
Create a report library for your key stakeholders:
For your most common recurring requests, build and save a series of stakeholder-specific templates. You can have a "Manager Weekly Overdue Report," a "Quarterly Board Summary," and an "Annual Audit-Ready Export." When a request comes in, you can generate the perfectly formatted report with a single click, eliminating the need to start from scratch.
Tag your training content by regulation or topic:
To easily report on specific compliance mandates, tag each course with relevant keywords such as "OSHA," "HIPAA," "anti-harassment," or "DEI," allowing you to instantly filter and generate a comprehensive report on a single regulatory area, even if those training modules are part of different, larger courses.
Empower leaders with self-service dashboards:
The best way to reduce ad-hoc requests is to empower stakeholders to find their answers. A department head doesn't necessarily need a static report; they need an answer to the question, "Is my team compliant?" A live dashboard with simple filters allows them to get that answer instantly, freeing up your team from ever having to run the report at all.
7. Learners complete training, but it’s not in the system
It’s one of the most common and frustrating conversations in compliance management. An employee insists they’ve completed their required certification, but their record shows them as overdue. They have either a PDF certificate saved on their desktop or a paper copy stored in a desk drawer. Still, to the official system of record, it never happened—a situation that creates friction for the employee who did the work, the manager caught in the middle, and the L&D team tasked with verifying the completion.
The problem stems from a disconnect between the central learning platform and the diverse ways employees complete training. A significant amount of compliance training happens outside the LMS, often through third-party vendors, at industry conferences, or in-person with a physical sign-in sheet. Nearly 45% of organizations still track some training with spreadsheets or paper forms, and a staggering 67% admit they struggle to capture completion data from virtual or third-party courses.
Without an easy and standardized way to integrate external proof into the central system, records become inaccurate and incomplete. The resulting data not only skews your compliance reporting by showing compliant employees as being at risk, but it also forces your L&D team to spend hours manually chasing down, verifying, and uploading records one by one.
Practical fixes
The solution is to create simple, official channels for employees and managers to submit external training proof directly into the LMS, ensuring all learning—no matter where it happens—is tracked in one place.
Certificate upload portals with manager sign-off:
Provide a feature that allows a learner to upload their own certificate (as a PDF, image, or other file) directly to their learning profile. The system should then trigger a notification for their manager to review the submission, verify its authenticity, and approve it with a single click, creating an official record without any L&D intervention.
Digital verification forms for instructor-led sessions:
For training that doesn’t come with a formal certificate, like observing a safety procedure or attending an informal workshop, use digital validation forms. A manager can simply open a form in the LMS on their phone or tablet, confirm the employee has demonstrated the skill, and submit it, which generates a timestamped and verifiable record of completion.
Automated nightly reconciliation:
The underlying solution is to use a compliance training system specifically designed to support external data. It should not only allow for uploads and approvals but also enable you to set expiration dates and send automated reminders for externally managed certifications. This prompts employees to renew and submit their credentials before they lapse.
Mobile capture for on-the-go proof:
Absorb LMS’s mobile app lets field staff snap a photo of completion evidence the moment training finishes, attach it to their transcript, and remove the “I’ll upload it later” excuse.
8. The regulation rules changed again
Your team has just spent months rolling out a new training program, and every employee is certified. Then, the news arrives: a key federal regulation has been updated. Suddenly, a significant portion of your carefully crafted training content is obsolete and non-compliant.
This isn't a rare inconvenience; it's the central challenge of the profession. According to a compliance survey, 44.1% of compliance professionals rank keeping up with regulatory changes as their top challenge. The sheer volume of these updates is staggering; analysts logged 61,228 distinct regulatory events in 2022 alone, one of the highest counts on record.
For L&D teams, this creates a relentless cycle of reactive updates. If a course is a single video or SCORM file, updating even small details—like a new policy or fine amount—requires a costly, time-consuming project to edit and redeploy the entire course.
Furthermore, if training content isn't meticulously tagged to cover the relevant regulations, the first step is often a frantic manual search through the entire library to identify which courses have been impacted by a change.
Practical fixes
The only way to keep pace with changing regulations is to build your compliance training program for speed and adaptability from the start.
Design courses in modules, not monoliths:
Instead of creating long, single-file courses, design them as a collection of smaller, independent assets. A course could be a playlist containing a short introductory video, a linked PDF of the most current policy, a scenario-based activity, and a quiz. When a regulation changes, you simply update the relevant piece, such as the policy document, without needing to modify the rest of the course.
Run quarterly compliance-library audits:
Don't wait for a regulation to change to find out your content is outdated. Create a formal partnership with your legal and compliance teams to get early warnings about upcoming changes. Supplement this with a scheduled, quarterly audit of your training library to proactively identify and refresh content covering the most volatile regulatory areas.
Use bulk-update tools to refresh due dates and notify learners:
When a new version of a course is ready, the update process should be swift and straightforward. Absorb LMS allows you to retire an old course seamlessly and, in a single bulk action, enroll a targeted group of employees in the new version. That way, the workforce stays up to date, and you have a clear audit trail of the transition.
Archive (but don’t delete) superseded content:
Maintain an archive labeled “retired” for audit and traceability purposes. Auditors can see which version employees completed and when, while active learners see only the current, compliant material.
By treating regulatory change as an expected routine rather than an emergency, you keep content current, minimize rework, and show auditors that your program evolves at the speed of the rulebook.
9. The risks are invisible until they’re a problem
A compliance report might show a 98% completion rate for a required course, which appears to be a success. However, that impressive number can hide a critical flaw: the 2% of non-compliant employees might all be senior technicians who handle hazardous materials, or forklift operators in your busiest warehouse. The report shows what happened, but it fails to show what it means.
That lack of context is the core danger of traditional compliance reporting. It shows lagging indicators but provides no insight into your actual risk exposure. You can't easily see where the highest-impact risks are concentrated. Are lapses happening more often in a specific department? Are new hires completing critical safety training on time? Without a risk-based view, you’re unable to spot these trends, and the data provides a false sense of security.
Failing to see these underlying risks is more than an administrative blind spot; it’s a significant financial liability. According to a report, the average annual cost of non-compliance for businesses now exceeds $15 million, nearly three times the cost of maintaining compliance, which averages around $5.5 million per year. Risks are always present, but when they’re invisible, they become impossible to control until they result in a costly incident or a failed audit.
Practical fixes
The goal is to transform your reporting from a passive, historical record into an active, forward-looking risk management tool. You need to focus not just on completion rates, but on the potential impact of any gaps.
Risk-ranked dashboards:
Shift your focus from generic, overall completion numbers to high-priority risks. Creating reports and dashboards designed to answer specific risk questions, such as “Show me all uncertified forklift operators,” or “Which employees in the finance department are overdue on their anti-bribery training?” immediately surfaces your most critical vulnerabilities.
Trend analytics and early-warning thresholds:
Track month-over-month slippage in key certifications. Set alerts when completion rates dip below 95% or when a region’s overdue count jumps more than 10% week-over-week. Additionally, your frontline managers are best positioned to understand the operational risks within their teams.
Provide them with manager dashboards that not only show who’s late but also highlight the most critical gaps for their specific team. When a manager can instantly see that their most experienced technician has an expiring certification, they can act before it becomes a problem.
Integrate training metrics with enterprise risk tools:
Elevate training compliance from an L&D metric to a key business signal by feeding it into your organization's central risk management platform (often called a GRC system). When your Chief Risk Officer can see how training compliance impacts the company's overall risk posture, the L&D team becomes a crucial partner in protecting the business.
AI-powered anomaly detection:
Use tools like Absorb Intelligent Assist to quickly identify potential issues, such as locations where completions have stalled after a policy update. By querying relevant data, you can investigate and address the issue before it becomes a compliance risk.
10. Leadership doesn’t get L&D’s role in compliance reporting
After solving the nine previous challenges—centralizing data, automating reports, and creating visibility—the final hurdle is often a human one. Many L&D teams find themselves in a vicious cycle where leadership views compliance as a mandatory cost center, resulting in a lack of investment in better tools. Without improved tools, the L&D team is stuck with manual, administrative work, which reinforces the perception that their role is purely administrative.
The root of this disconnect is often a language barrier. L&D teams report on activities such as course completions and pass rates, while leadership wants to understand the business impact, including risk exposure and brand reputation. Although leaders overwhelmingly agree that compliance is key to perception, with a recent survey showing that 73% believe meeting standards improves their brand's reputation, the reports they receive often fall short. As a survey found, less than half of companies (48%) rate their compliance reporting as being “higher-quality/more insightful,” leaving leadership without a clear view of the value being generated.
When L&D fails to translate its work into the language of risk and business value, it is relegated to the role of a cost center. The immense value of a well-run compliance program—protecting the company’s license to operate, building customer trust, and ensuring operational excellence—remains invisible to the very people who control the budget and set the strategy.
Practical fixes
To break the cycle, you must reframe the conversation. The solution is to consciously translate your team’s metrics into the language of business impact, demonstrating that practical compliance training isn’t just a cost, but a strategic asset.
Translate completions into risk dollars:
Instead of reporting that "95% of employees completed safety training," frame it as, "We have reduced our potential for workplace incidents and operational downtime by certifying 95% of our staff." Instead of "100% of the sales team finished the anti-bribery course," report that "We have protected our revenue streams and market reputation by fully training our sales team on anti-corruption standards."
Create an executive-level view of compliance:
Design a high-level dashboard specifically for senior leaders. It shouldn't display individual names but should use visuals like color-coded maps or trend lines to show overall risk by business unit, progress toward goals, and how compliance compares to last quarter.
Align compliance reporting with enterprise goals:
Enhance the impact of your reporting by linking it to the company's key strategic initiatives, such as environmental, social, and governance (ESG). Reporting on anti-harassment and DEI training directly supports the "Social" pillar. Reporting on environmental safety training supports the "Environmental" pillar. Doing so positions compliance training as a key contributor to the company's public commitments and corporate responsibility.
When leaders can track real-time risk reduction and even brag about it to investors, training spending stops looking like overhead and starts reading as enterprise insurance.
The other side: Challenges a compliance officer faces
The challenges detailed in this article aren’t unique to L&D and HR professionals. Across the aisle, their key partners in this process, the Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) and their team, face a remarkably similar set of pressures. While the L&D team focuses on the training and attestation component, the compliance function is responsible for the entire organizational response to a tidal wave of regulatory changes.
The data paints a clear picture of their reality. According to recent industry surveys, 85% of CCOs say regulatory requirements have grown more complex in just the past three years, and 43% rank “new and changing regulations” as their single most significant hurdle. They’re under constant pressure to interpret complex legal texts, translate them into workable business policies, and prove to boards and regulators that the company is adhering to the rules.
When you compare their challenges to the ten points we’ve explored, the parallels are striking:
- Like L&D, they struggle with information trapped in different systems and the lack of a single source of truth for policies and controls.
- Like L&D, they’re a "report factory" for different stakeholders, creating custom reports for the board, auditors, and business leaders.
- And just like L&D, they often struggle to move beyond being seen as a “cost center” and prove their strategic value in proactively protecting the business.
Both functions are essentially fighting the same battle on different fronts. They’re both trying to translate complex external requirements into clear internal actions and provide verifiable proof that it’s all working. Recognizing this shared struggle is the first step toward a powerful solution: cross-functional collaboration.
Where L&D can close the gap
Instead of working in parallel, L&D and compliance can become a force multiplier for each other. Breaking down the walls between these two functions can solve many of the challenges outlined in this entire article.
Establish a unified compliance committee:
Create a formal, cross-functional team with leaders from L&D, compliance, legal, and IT. This group should meet regularly to review upcoming regulatory changes, assess their impact on both policy and training, and coordinate the company's response. A shared calendar and priority list ensure no one is working with outdated information.
Share a common technology vision:
Both teams need a system built on a single source of truth, with robust reporting and automation. When selecting an LMS or a risk management platform, representatives from both teams should be involved in the process. The goal is to choose systems that can integrate seamlessly, enabling training data to inform the company’s overall risk posture and automatically trigger training updates in response to regulatory alerts.
Create a proactive communication loop:
The compliance team serves as the company's early warning system for regulatory changes. Establish a formal process that requires immediate notification to the L&D team whenever a rule is updated. In return, the L&D team can provide the compliance team with real-time dashboards on training effectiveness, which serves as a crucial control measure that auditors and regulators require.
Present a unified risk story to leadership:
Instead of reporting separately, L&D and compliance can present a unified “people & policy risk" report to the board. By combining data on policy adoption with data on training completion and effectiveness, you can tell a more powerful and strategic story. This approach directly addresses the challenge of demonstrating value, positioning both functions not as cost centers but as essential partners in driving operational excellence and protecting the organization.
Compliance reporting doesn’t have to be a last-minute scramble. When all your data is consolidated in a single place, manual spreadsheets give way to live dashboards, and automated reminders keep everyone on track, so audits no longer feel like fire drills. Every pain point we've covered—from scattered data and manual reporting to shifting rules and audit-day surprises—can be solved with the targeted fixes built into a modern learning platform.
The payoff is much bigger than just ticking a box. Maintaining clear, up-to-date compliance records helps you avoid fines and legal trouble, while real-time insights empower managers to address issues promptly before they turn into serious problems. Additionally, leadership is finally recognizing compliance training for what it truly is: a smart investment in protecting your brand and building a resilient business.
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