2020 End of Year Roundup

2020 is nearly over and it’s safe to assume that many businesses will be glad to see the back of it. The Coronavirus pandemic brought unprecedented challenges that look likely to linger with us going into 2021, forcing businesses to quickly adapt to new processes and working environments.

However, in spite of the difficulties that we have all faced, the end of a year is traditionally a time for reflection. It is in this spirit that we wanted to look back on some of the highlights and updates from EssentialSkillz in 2020 as we move with optimism into a new year.

1) Courses and Risk Assessments Released in 2020

In 2020 we were pleased to add to our extensive library of courses with the release of an additional 20 new courses and 8 course updates. These included:

Sleep Essentials
Physical Activity
Pandemic Awareness
Coronavirus Course
Environmental Awareness
Resource Efficiency
Coping with Covid-19 anxiety
Health and Safety Induction
Money Laundering
Data Protection Course
Wellbeing & Remote Working
Lone Working
Homeworking
Return to work
Return to work for managers
DriveWize
Managing Health and Safety
Financial Wellbeing
Hand arm vibration
Abrasive Wheels
Modern Slavery
Working at height
Prevent Duty
Risk Assessment
UKATA Category A Asbestos Awareness
The Equality Act
Diversity & Inclusion
Manual Handling

In 2020 we also released 6 new risk assessments:

Coronavirus Self Assessment
Fire Safety Self Assessment
Manual Handling Self Assessment
Homeworkers Risk Assessment
Lone Working Risk Assessment
DriveWize Risk Assessment

2) New Refresher Pack of Health & Safety courses

We created a brand new Health & Safety Refresher Pack containing 7 of our most popular health and safety course titles:

Fire Safety
ErgoWize (DSE)
Slips, Trips and Falls
Electrical Safety
Manual Handling
Risk Assessment
Hazardous Substances

Each course includes the most critical, need-to-know information from our full-length titles and are about 10 minutes in duration. The courses can be used in conjunction with the full-length Health and safety courses we offer to help refresh employees’ knowledge on various topics.

3) Policy Sign Off feature

Our unique policy sign off feature is gaining significant popularity within the system and can be used to digitally sign off on policies and documents. This feature enables you to roll-out policies, documents and policy refreshers annually to your employees like a normal course. Employees can then read, understand and digitally sign off against the policy or document which is then recorded on their training record within your compliance platform. A digitally signed and time-stamped certificate is also saved to each employee’s record within the compliance platform.

4) New Course Templates

We have released 5 new screen templates that will allow you to efficiently create more interactive and engaging content within any new or existing course. They are very user friendly and also include detailed video tutorials to help you master each template.

They are:

Drag & drop template screen
Question template screen
Statements template screen
Clickable template screen
New Contenttemplate screen

How are you managing your GDPR compliance requirements?

GDPR added a significant compliance burden on DPOs and data processors. Data breaches must be reported to the authorities within 72 hours, each new data processing activity needs to be documented and Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIA) must be carried out for processing that is likely to result in a high risk to individuals. Penalties for breaching GDPR can reach into the tens of millions of Euros.

“In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.”