VinciWorks is hitting the road to deliver practical, face-to-face seminars on the SRA’s new approach to continuing competence. Attendees will learn how to identify learning needs, build a learning and development plan and consider methods for recording and demonstrating that they have fulfilled the SRA’s requirements.

Dates

  • May 9: Birmingham
  • May 10: Manchester
  • May 31: Bristol
  • June 1: London

Details

  • Time – 10:00am – 1:00pm
  • CPD – 3 hours 🙂
  • Cost – £90 (early bird £75)
  • Presenter – Gary Yantin, Director of Best Practice, VinciWorks

Who should attend?

  • HR professionals
  • COLPs and COFAs
  • L&D teams
  • Practice managers
  • Solicitors that wish to understand how to comply with the new regulations

About the presenter

Gary Yantin is Director of Best Practice at VinciWorks — a leading provider of online compliance courses and risk management software. VinciWorks courses are used by over 20% of all solicitors and are considered to be the gold standard for compliance. Gary is a leading expert on the SRA’s changes to CPD and has helped VinciWorks develop the first software tool for compliance with the new approach to continuing competence. To learn more visit www.vinciworks.com/competence.

Ahead of our continuing competence roadshow, Gary Yantin, VinciWorks’ Director of Best Practice, checked in with leading stakeholders to discuss how law firms are finding the transition from 16-hours CPD to continuing competence. He spoke to Richard Williams, SRA’s policy lead, as well as some early-adopter firms. Here are five key findings.

1. Awareness is up, but there is still confusion

Awareness of the new regime is improving but there is still confusion amongst some firms about what continuing competence means and what the SRA are looking for in terms of demonstrating that solicitors have achieved it.

2. No one-size fits all for number of hours

The SRA has made clear that there is no rule for whether there will be more or less learning under the new system. The amount of learning undertaken depends on a range of factors including seniority and area of practice. From VinciWorks conversations with firms another factor will be the firm’s’ own attitude to learning. For most of the firms we spoke to there is a common view that erring on the side of doing more learning can do no harm.

3. Many firms will still require 16 hours internally

The SRA were keen to point out, as they have repeatedly, that for many solicitors it will be possible to be competent with far less than 16 hours. However we hear that many firms will be sticking with 16 hours even after they adopt the new approach.  Some are imposing an alternative number of hours, be it 4 to tie in with the former accredited amount of CPD or a higher figure on the basis that the more learning a solicitor does the better.

4. YouTube will not replace high-quality training

What to learn is going to be an area that solicitors and their firms are likely to struggle with in the early years of competency. While the SRA are keen to point out that watching YouTube or listening to podcasts are adequate forms of learning, the firms we have spoken to appear to be sticking with tradition for now. Classroom and online modular learning being the favoured mediums.  

5. Accreditation will be up to the market

With the removal of accredited training suppliers, we wanted to know if there was a concern about a decline in quality. The SRA have no such concern. It is up to the market to create good quality learning without being restricted by having to achieve and maintain SRA approval. The SRA maintains that the market will do a far better job of establishing learning leaders than the SRA could. With this level of freedom from suppliers and for solicitors, alternative methods of learning are likely to emerge. Most firms will be watching their peers and competitors in the early years for guidance on what works.

When we think of hacking, we tend to imagine global banks being attacked to the tune of billions – but according to a study by cyber security firm Symantec, companies with fewer than 250 employees now account for a third of all cyber attacks. Small businesses are often woefully underprepared when it comes to cyber security – and this puts them in the crosshairs.

Small businesses are attractive targets for cybercriminals because they usually lack the cybersecurity precautions of larger organisations. The consequences of these attacks can be extremely costly, from lost productivity to company reputation.

This is why, according to Toni Allen, UK head of client propositions at the British Standards Institute, “SMEs are now being pinpointed by digital attackers.”

A cyber attack can wreak havoc on a small company’s finances: a UK government survey reported that for small and medium sized business the average cost of the worst breach is between £75,000 and £310,800. Furthermore, when the EU’s new General Data Protection Regulation comes into force in 2018, allowing security breaches to compromise customer data could result in companies being fined 4% of their annual turnover, up to €20m.

Finances may recover in time, but the damage to a brand’s reputation for dependability and customer security may well be irreparable. It is vital that small businesses take steps to prevent such attacks from happening.

“Burying your head in the sand may save money in the short term,” Alex Fenton, a digital business expert and lecturer at Salford University told The Guardian, “but the cost of hacking could range from minor inconvenience, reputation damage, loss of customer data, fines and ultimately company closure.”

Instituting a secure password policy (never the same password for more than one account, use at least three random words) and ensuring that your cyber security software is business-grade and up to date are simple steps that could protect you.

However, the most essential step towards cyber-security is staff training. Many hacks come about because of vulnerability created by simple human error: the wrong link clicked in an email, some malware hidden in innocuous seeming MP3 software. Educating all staff to practise good digital hygiene could mean the survival of your business.

“You don’t want your first breach to be a learning exercise,” security expert Lawrence Pingree says. “Your brand, even your company, may not survive to learn from those lessons.”

How can VinciWorks help?

VinciWorks’ online cyber security training help keep businesses remain secure against ever-evolving cyber threats. Courses available range from digestible, five-minute Take 5 micro-learning modules to in depth, detailed eLearning courses covering multiple topics within a subject area.

FIFA has announced a set of reforms designed to repair the reputation of the beleaguered organisation following the scandal which erupted last May, and safeguard it against future corruption.

The reforms, which were passed unanimously by the Executive Committee, are concerned primarily with limiting the authority of FIFA’s ‘top brass.’ They include presidential term limits, the separation of political and management functions, salary transparency, and “concrete steps to increase the role of women in the governance of football with a minimum of one female representative elected as a Council member per confederation.”

“These reforms are moving FIFA towards improved governance, greater transparency and more accountability,” said FIFA’s Acting President Issa Hayatou. “They mark a milestone on our path towards restoring FIFA’s credibility as a modern, trusted and professional sports organisation. This signals the beginning of a culture shift at FIFA.”

The scandal claimed the careers of two of the most powerful figures in world football. FIFA President Sepp Blatter and Uefa President Michel Platini were found guilty of breaches concerning a £1.3m “disloyal payment” made to Platini in 2011, and banned for eight years from all football-related activities by FIFA’s ethics committee.

However, of more concern to the future of the sport is the loss of trust experienced by the organisation since the scandal broke last summer. A global survey of fans conducted by football app Forza Football found that a whopping 69% had lost confidence in football’s governing body. 43% even said that that they enjoyed the sport less after the learning about the scandals. These statistics are a reminder of the potential reputational damage to businesses that are connected to scandals.

Cobus de Swardt, head of Transparency International, summed up the long-lasting damage to brand football: “As fans we have a love affair with football. When our teams win we are ecstatic, when they lose we are devastated. But when results – whether of games, or rights for hosting events, elections, etc. – are driven not by fair competition, but by corruption, we feel betrayed.”

“The poll results show us beyond any doubt that FIFA has lost the trust of football supporters,” added Gareth Sweeney, the editor of Transparency International’s global corruption report. “But they also show it is still possible for FIFA to regain that trust. At least half those polled will give FIFA a second chance. That’s why FIFA must not only put serious reforms in place but be seen to do that.”

There are important lessons to be learned here for any business. A Concerto Marketing Group and Research Now survey, found that when customers trust a brand, 82% will continue to use it frequently, and 83% will recommend it to others. Building and maintaining trust and transparency is an essential component to your continued success. If corruption can turn notoriously passionate football fans away from the beautiful game, then the potential risks to businesses are immense.

How can VinciWorks help?

VinciWorks’ anti-bribery training suite helps businesses prevent corruption. We utilise the latest instructional design techniques including video, scenarios, gamification and micro-learning to ensure courses are engaging and create desired behavioural changes in your organisation.

Image by alegermino, used under CC2.0

“Fraud shames our financial system,” said Home Secretary Theresa May as she announced a new task force to combat fraud in the UK last month. She continued: “It undermines the credibility of the economy, ruins businesses and causes untold distress to people of all walks of life. For too long, there has been too little understanding of the problem and too great a reluctance to take steps to tackle it.”

The task force will represent a new level of collaboration between government, law enforcement and the banking sector, and is committed to “tackling fraud and reducing its devastating impact.”

The announcement of the task force hasn’t come a moment too soon: last year, fraud was included in the crime figures for England and Wales for the first time, and the figures were sobering. The survey suggested that 5.1 million cases of fraud occurred in 2015, ranging from credit card scams to the CEO email racket, when an employee is duped into transferring money by a false email from the CEO.

Financial Fraud Action UK warns that small businesses are increasingly becoming targets for fraudsters. “Criminals are turning their attention to businesses because successfully scamming a company can net the fraudster a much bigger haul than they could steal from an individual. Fraudsters also understand that small businesses are used to processing all kinds of payments and so a simple request to change an invoice or provide some financial information has a good chance of deceiving an accounts department,” said Katy Worobec, Director of FFA UK. It’s clear that businesses must be alert to the increasing risks, and prepared to defend against these kinds of attacks.

Invoice scams represent one of the fastest growing areas of fraud that affects small businesses. Fraudsters send out a false invoice to a company, often with a payment due date that has passed, and threaten that non-payment will affect credit rating. These fake invoices are often targeted to lower-level admin employees in the hopes that they will be paid quickly in a panic – and not questioned. A more sophisticated version of the scam is sending invoices as attachments that, if opened and downloaded, will give the scammer access to information stored on the infected computer. Another variation is mandate fraud, where a company is duped into diverting legitimate invoice payments into the fraudster’s bank account.

It is essential that all employees are trained and regularly reminded to be on alert for potential fraud. Any unusual invoices must be double-checked, anyone phoning to update the payment details of a regular direct debit must be thoroughly vetted, and emails purporting to be from senior staff members must be verified before action is taken. Companies must also remember that fraud is constantly evolving, and fraudsters go to great lengths to deceive. So while it’s important to train staff to spot fraud, a general awareness of the risks and a healthy suspicion of anything unusual are also valuable defences against criminal activity.

How can VinciWorks help?

Our Fraud and Market Abuse training suite is designed for employees at all levels and provides an overview of what fraud is, why people commit fraud, and the behaviours necessary to identify and report suspected fraud.

In this webinar, Dr. Suzanne Doyle-Morris, founder of the InclusIQ Institute, discusses how unconscious bias could negatively impact the culture and competitiveness of your firm. She provides tips for overcoming bias and actionable steps to create cultural change at your firm.

The webinar will include:

  • Best practice
  • Case studies
  • Practical advice

Please fill in the form below to receive instant access to the webinar: Unconscious Bias: Beyond Protected Characteristics

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This recording is provided free of charge. If you found it valuable, feel free to forward it to a colleague.

Do you struggle to engage learners with your eLearning? Do your learners groan at the thought of annual training refreshers? Then it’s time to mix it up with our new range of Take 5 microlearning modules.

For the uninitiated, microlearning means short, highly specific bursts of information around a single learning objective. Keeping it short and to the point makes microlearning digestible and memorable. What’s not to love?

But that’s just scratching the surface of why we’re backing microlearning in our mission to engage learners with compliance / health and safety training. Take 5 and read on to find out what to expect from our microlearning modules.

Precision content

Whether it’s down to reduced attention spans, changing habits, or growing demands on our time, asking learners to focus on an eLearning course for even half an hour uninterrupted is a tall order.

That’s why Take 5 modules take a maximum of five minutes to complete – just like a coffee break. After all, who can’t make time for a coffee? If you’re thinking, “30 minutes into 5 doesn’t go…” Of course, you’re right, and you’ve identified the beauty of microlearning!

Rather than attempt to address every learning objective under the sun in one sitting, microlearning crystallises content around a single learning objective. This minimises bloat, keeps content relevant, and sends a clear message to learners: you value their time.

Bespoke curriculum

Early eLearning had much in common with books, right down to the page turning, but often lacked a key feature of books: the ability to skip irrelevant chapters. So, whatever the learner’s expertise, entire courses had to be completed from start to finish in a linear fashion.

Today, we’ve done away with page turning, embraced deep scrolling, and split courses into sections that can be completed any order – but to pass a course, learners must still complete every section. This either forces learners to sit through irrelevant training or forces you to develop bespoke courses.

Instead of that, why not pick and mix Take 5 modules to create a bespoke curriculum based on each learner’s capabilities, covering only the learning outcomes they need? Better yet, use a tool like Astute’s Performance Manager to identify those objectives and enrol learners for you.

Flexible format

Building standalone, 5 minute microlearning modules based around a single learning objective allows for far more flexibility than the complexity of creating cohesive, 30-minute-plus eLearning courses covering a variety of topics.

This frees us to get creative on and come up with the most engaging way to convey a single learning objective. We’ve already identified a variety of distinct formats for our Take 5 modules, each designed to appeal to different learning styles, including:

  • Challenge – gamified scenarios based around desirable behaviours.
  • Short Study – investigations subjects at a ‘need to know’ level for every day competence.
  • Presentation – video-based topic overviews, typically with case studies for extra emotional impact and engagement.
  • Toolbox Talk – designed to assist managers or trainers in facilitating face to face training sessions.

Of course, there’s no reason to stop there, and no need to limit a single learning objective to a single style. So if game-based learning works for some of your staff, but others love to just read the information, you’ll have a Take 5 module available to meet their needs.

Try Take 5 Today

We have over 65 Take 5 modules in development covering a variety of essential compliance / health and safety topics and plan to release 3-4 each month, but our first two are already available:

  • Money Laundering Challenge: puts learners in the role of fraud investigator – but will they be able to confiscate all of the money?
  • Gifts and Hospitality Challenge: asks learners to identify which gifts can be accepted and which are actually bribes.

Contact us now to arrange a demo or find out more.

Recently, the government unveiled draft legislation that would require companies to publish their mean and median gender pay gaps by April 2018. The legislation is an attempt to close the gender wage gap which, despite the Equal Pay Act turning 45 this year, persists.

Overall, men in full time work earn 14% more than women. When part time work is taken into consideration, the pay gap becomes 19.1%, compared to an EU average of 16.4% – and at the top end of the pay scale, the divide between men and women is nearly 55% according to the TUC. Campaigners have warned that, unless drastic action is taken, the pay gap will take a further 54 years to close.

“In recent years we’ve seen the best employers make ground breaking strides in tackling gender inequality,” said Nicky Morgan, Minister for women and equalities. “But the job won’t be complete until we see the talents of women and men recognised equally and fairly in every workplace.

That’s why I am announcing a raft of measures to support women in their careers from the classroom to the boardroom, leaving nowhere for gender inequality to hide.”

The proposed legislation comes just weeks after the Equality and Human Rights Commission found that, despite girls outperforming boys at university, female graduates start on salaries between £15,000 and just under £24,000, while men are more likely to attain salaries of £24,000 and above upon graduation.

Laura Carstensen, an EHRC commissioner, said: “45 years after the Equal Pay Act was brought in to herald an end to gender pay inequality, our research provides clear evidence that the old economic and societal barriers are still prevalent for working women and overshadowing the prospects of our girls and young women yet to enter the workplace.”

The proposed laws would require firms to:

  • take a “snapshot” of what employees are being paid from April 2017 and publish the details by April 2018
  • divide their pay distribution into four bands and work out the number of men and women in each quartile.
  • publish the difference between their mean bonus payments paid to men and women, and the proportion of male and female employees that received a bonus
  • publish their gender pay gap information on their website, accompanied by a written statement confirming that the information is accurate.

Requiring companies to publish the details of their gender pay gap on their company website will have a significant impact on brand image, reputation and ability to recruit and retain staff. Further, by bringing increased awareness to pay generally, the potential for costly equal pay disputes may well be significant.

Kate Hodgkiss, employment partner at DLA Piper, advises employers “to consider conducting a pay audit on an informal basis in advance of any regulations coming into effect”. If after doing so you find discrepancies in salaries between your female and male employees, you must investigate and be prepared to demonstrate that those differences are not related to the sex of the jobholders.

The legislation is expected to come into effect in October 2016, which will give companies six months before the first deadline to report their gender pay gap.

About VinciWorks

VinciWorks provide off-the-shelf eLearning courses that enable organisations to promote diverse workplaces including Introduction to Equality and Diversity and Manager’s Guides to Equality and Diversity. Contact us today to learn more.

We’ve been hard at work on product innovations and are excited to share details of the latest enhancements to Astute, our eLearning Platform.

Social Notifications

Users and teams can now enjoy in-platform messaging with social media-style notifications, further extending Astute’s capabilities as a social knowledge sharing platform, while administrators can create organisation-wide notifications.

Like emails, notifications can be triggered by activities like passing a course or logging in for the first time, making them a powerful, flexible communication tool that minimises needless email.

My Team / My Progress

Astute’s new My Progress feature gives learners an overview of their progress through courses and assessments they’re enrolled on. For managers, My Team provides an overview of progress, total time spent, and number of attempts for each individual in their team without the need to delve into reports or spreadsheets.

Performance Manager Extension

Astute’s latest extension, Performance Manager, gives organisations the power to identify employees’ individual development requirements and deliver tailored training – all through one central platform.

With customisable job profiles, capability frameworks and assessments, you’ll be able to gather multi-source feedback, benchmark capabilities and identify untapped potential within your organisation. Where capability gaps are identified, learners are presented with development opportunities which can be links to online resources, files, or Astute courses.

Contact us today to find out more about Astute and Performance Manager.