.ISO 45001 is a new Occupational Health and Safety Management standard that will become the accepted international benchmark, replacing OHSAS 18001.

It will pose challenges to both organisations who are looking to transition from the existing OHSAS 18001 standard or who are adopting the new criteria from scratch. Ignoring the new standard may be possible in the short term, but as it becomes established, a failure to adhere to its principles could be a corporate governance red flag signalling that the Health & Safety of workers is not being taken seriously. Ignoring it could also jeopardise contracts where the customer specifies compliance.

Although not mandatory, it’s estimated that over 100,000 companies across the globe will have adopted the standard in the first year. This means top management in organisations will be under pressure to step up to the challenge.

Les utilisateurs peuvent changer la langue de leur cours en cliquant sur un bouton
Les utilisateurs peuvent changer la langue de leur cours en cliquant sur un bouton

Le cours en ligne Règlement Général sur la Protection des Données de VinciWorks, GDPR: Confidentialité au travail (GDPR: Privacy at Work), avec d’autres cours dans la suite de formation VinciWorks GDPR, est maintenant disponible en français. Le cours combine la dernière en matière de politique et de droit avec les lignes directrices des meilleures pratiques. Il fournit des scénarios du monde réel, des fonctions interactives et des questions de révision pour tester la compréhension des points clés. En complétant ce cours, les utilisateurs apprendront comment se conformer aux lois sur la protection des données pour leur rôle spécifique dans l’organisation. La formation en ligne est basée sur le Règlement général sur la protection des données (RGPD).

Alors que le GDPR entrera en vigueur dans toute l’Europe le 25 mai 2018, la France a déjà promulgué une législation pour préparer le nouveau régime de protection des données.

démo le cours

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GDPR training in French
VinciWorks’ GDPR training can easily be viewed in multiple languages at the click of a button

VinciWorks’ online GDPR course, GDPR: Privacy at Work, together with the other courses in VinciWorks’ GDPR training suite, is now available in French. The course combines the latest in policy and law with best practice guidelines. It provides real-world scenarios, interactive features and review questions to test understanding of key points. By completing this course users will learn how to comply with data protection laws for their specific role in the organisation. The online training is based on the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).

While GDPR will be coming into force across Europe on 25 May 2018, France has already enacted some legislation to prepare for the new data protection regime.

Demo GDPR training in French

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More apprentices due to join the workplace,

The 2008 Education and Skills Act changed the rules about what young people could do at 16. If they don’t want to study full-time, they must find employment that includes education and training until they are 18. More young people in the workforce means more demands for Apprenticeship Training.

Employers and training providers initially had little incentive to create new opportunities, and so some young people embarked on courses they didn’t really want to do or took jobs where the training wasn’t very valuable. The charity Campaign for Learning identified that raising the participation age exacerbated the gap in resources for 16 to 18-year-olds who didn’t want to follow an academic route.

“Too many young people may still find themselves in jobs with little chance of developing worthwhile skills or gaining recognised qualifications.”

To encourage employers to provide more apprenticeships with a structured standard and an assessment plan, the UK government introduced the apprenticeship levy in April 2017. Large employers (with a pay bill of more than £3m) must set aside 0.5% of their pay bill to invest in apprenticeship training. Small and medium employers are not forced to provide apprenticeships, but if they do the government will pay 90% of the cost of training and assessment.

The news headlines at the end of 2017 suggested that the levy led to a fall in the number of apprenticeships. However, whilst the number of people starting apprenticeships in quarter 1 of the 2017/18 academic year (August to October) fell by nearly 60% compared to the same period in 2016, April 2017 had seen a doubling of the number of new starts compared with the previous year, suggesting perhaps that employers had filled places early.

As shown in the pie chart, three service sectors together represent 7 out of every 10 apprenticeships, with engineering and manufacturing coming a close fourth. Of these, health and social care is the biggest growth area, with apprenticeships starts bucking the overall trend by increasing during the year.

or those companies paying the levy, the money is saved into a digital account. Since employers have two years to spend that money, many might be using the time to plan how it can best be spent to fill anticipated skills gaps, such as those arising as EU workers return home in anticipation of BREXIT. There could be a lot of young people entering the workplace as the clock ticks on previous levy payments.

What do I need to do to protect young people at work during Apprenticeship Training?

The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations require employers to pay attention to the need to protect young people at work

“from any risks to their health or safety which are a consequence of their lack of experience, or absence of awareness of existing or potential risks or the fact that young persons have not yet fully matured.”

Whilst it is obvious to you not to take drinks into a tool shop, the Starbucks generation will need to be reminded; whilst you know it’s common sense to wipe up spills, they might have always left that to their parents!

Alongside the apprenticeship training covered by the levy, other training will need to be arranged and paid for by the employer. This includes site inductions, local evacuation arrangements and basic health and safety training covering topics like slips and trips, electrical safety, fire safety and personal protective equipment. You might want to cover other business areas too, such as site security, and if they have access to a computer at work, cybersecurity.

Whilst college attendance will cover some training requirements, how are you going to provide all the workplace training an apprentice needs? And how are you going to manage and track progress and monitor success? Let’s start by thinking like a millennial.

Different Generations Learn Differently

The stereotypes of baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964), generation X (1965 to 1979), millennials or Gen Y (1980 to 1995) and post-millennials or gen Z (those born since 1996) should be treated with caution since any generation has more differences than similarities. However, considering the experience of each is useful when deciding how to provide training. Baby boomers and generation X will remember blackboards at school, and at the younger end, whiteboards using odorous pens. Post-millennials joining the workplace now might never have seen a blackboard, and their whiteboards were connected to the Internet and touch sensitive.

Those blackboards were used by teachers to write notes which students copied into their books, learned for homework and were tested on in class. The teacher was the source of knowledge. Generations Y and Z learned to research topics at primary school. They watched YouTube for homework. They made films, papier-mâché models, or even wrote poems about scientific principles and historical events. They devised their own tests with an app.

eLearning is particularly suitable for younger “Digital natives”

Workplace learning for young people, therefore, should use active approaches and take advantage of what young people like doing – using computers! One such approach is the LOcHER project. Students use computers to do their own research and make their own posters, edit their own videos or devise their own competitions. See the glove-off challenge or the Dust n Boots rap for examples of motivated students.

E-learning is another area that gen Y are very comfortable with – provided it doesn’t spoon feed them. They are happy to guess at the right answers, and e-learning can allow them to do this, but without looking foolish in front of their peers.

Some young people choose apprenticeships as a positive choice over A-levels and university; others do it because they were told they weren’t good enough. Around one in ten of those starting apprenticeship training has a recognized learning difficulty, and the proportion has increased steadily since 2011/12. Some of these young people lack confidence. Making e-learning accessible to them – on computers at work, but also allowing them access on their own mobile devices, out of work time if they choose – means that they can repeat a lesson as often as they want until they feel confident. If attention deficit is a problem, an e-learning solution that allows students to break their learning into chunks of time that suits them has additional value. Ten minutes while they wait for the bus; five minutes when they get into work in the morning. It all adds up and will help everyone (not just those with specific learning needs) to take information in.

A Learning Management System is an elegant solution for Apprenticeship Training

So, if you going to combine e-learning, video projects, on-the-job briefings and the rest, how are you going to record the evidence you need to demonstrate that you are providing appropriate training?

What you don’t want is an online learning management system (LMS) that works OK for eLearning – but doesn’t support other forms of training, such that you must resort to a spreadsheet for the rest. A great LMS will allow you to track invites and attendance to classroom courses, completion of assignments and on-the-job successes too.

Facebook and Cambridge Analytica recently found themselves at the centre of a sensational dispute over the collection and use of personal data (in this case, information about users’ political alignment; data that’s known as ‘sensitive’ personal data under new GDPR legislation).

It all began with a ‘Personality Quiz’ app designed – and one can assume, approved – for use on the social networking site as a fun way to pass the time and connect with friends. As was common at the time, the app was also developed to harvest personal data of the user and, if reports are true, that of their unconsenting friends’ list.

According to reports, the personal data was then sold to Cambridge Analytica and used to psychologically profile users so that targeted advertisements and political spin/smear campaigns could be delivered straight to their profile pages and newsfeeds. A shocking allegation of invasion of privacy and political bias that has authorities on both sides of the pond enraged.

It’s worth noting that Facebook has since changed the amount of data that app-developers can scrape in this way and removed the app, demanding all its information be deleted.

Cambridge Analytica claims that it never used the data, and deleted it when Facebook told it to.

So, what can we take from the events?

It’s true that most users of social networking sites have no idea how much the platform actually knows about them (and their list of contacts). Remember, advertisers buying space on such networks are paying for your attention, and that attention is intensely targeted by the personal and sensitive data we’re almost all guilty of over-sharing online. The question left in the aftermath of such a scandal is this: with whom does the burden of data protection lie, the user or the platform?

Whilst admitting that mistakes were made and listing the more stringent measures he would implement to protect users’ data, Zuckerberg’s proposed solutions include a tool to empower users to control their own data on the site, e.g., which apps they allow to access their profile information and for how long.

Indeed, if we were to find a silver-lining here, it would be the empowerment and the raised level of awareness amongst social network users who have been following the story. Knowledge, as ever, is the key to prevention.

As GDPR legislation came into force in May 2018, individuals will have ever-more control over their personal data as well as increased access to it, a directive which is highlighted in Zuckerberg’s promise to ‘provide an easy way to revoke’ data-access permissions.

Looking to raise awareness about using social media, data protection, or GDPR? Visit our Compliance page to see our full range of courses.

GDPR webinar banner

Should we be deleting our whole email marketing list? How much can you actually be fined for a GDPR offence? In this webinar, Director of Course Development Nick Henderson and Yehuda Solomont explored the myths surrounding GDPR and helped separate the facts from the fiction. The webinar is based on our GDPR Mythbusters blog series that we are publishing in the lead up to GDPR day.

The webinar focused on the following GDPR myths

  • You’ll be fined 4% of global turnover for your first GDPR offence
  • GDPR requires you to delete all of a person’s data if they ask
  • You can’t send marketing emails anymore
  • HR policies and practices won’t be affected
  • No one will know if I don’t comply with GDPR
  • Compliance will cost you business

Watch now

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Calendar showing when GDPR is in force
The EU wide General Data Protection Regulation comes into full force on 25 May

VinciWorks GDPR Training Course

With so much GDPR compliance to get done, figuring out a training schedule for staff can seem like an impossible nut to crack. That’s why VinciWorks have made it as easy as possible to figure out what staff need trained on what, when and how often.

VinciWorks’ flagship online training course, GDPR: Privacy at Work does the hard work for you with a unique course builder and training modules specifically tailored to every role in an organisation. With thousands of possible course combinations available, it’s the sure-fire way to get the right training in front of the right staff at the right time. Our GDPR training suite provides further GDPR courses and knowledge checks.

VinciWorks has developed an entire suite of helpful GDPR resources to guide your organisation on its way to compliance. For a more in-depth look at training requirements for different departments and job roles, review our suggested schedule below that includes what resources to roll out post-GDPR to assess comprehension and understanding.

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People receiving marketing emails from their smart phones

How to make your digital marketing GDPR compliant:

Due to the requirements under GDPR for obtaining consent to collect and process data, one of the departments in your organisation most likely to be affected by the reguations are marketing professionals. 

Four years into GDPR, GDPR fines are bigger than ever before and always growing: there was a 113% increase in GDPR fines between July 2020 to July 2021, and penalties have grown as well, from 130.69 million in July 2020 to 293.96 million in July 20201. Many of the biggest fines were marketing related, including a €746m fine doled out to Amazon for compiling data on customers and a €225m fine to WhatsApp for failing to provide information in clear and plain language. 

Using information that is publicly available doesn’t mean you’re off the hook: agricultural conglomerate Monsanto were fined €4,000,000 for maintaining records of activists, since they were essentially tracking them in an ongoing way without informing them.

As a marketer who collects information, whether it’s information that’s publicly available or not, it’s more important than ever to make sure you’re doing so in a GDPR-compliant way. The guidance given in this blog will help your marketing team fully comply with GDPR.

Read: GDPR: 10 things to do now

Assessment: how ready are you for GDPR?

Marketing lists

In June 2017, JD Weatherspoons felt the best way for its digital marketing to become compliant with GDPR was to delete its entire marketing list. While this may be the favourable approach for the pub chain, GDPR certainly does not require businesses to delete their entire marketing list.

Organisations can provide customer details to third parties only if they made this clear when the information was being collected. Records of how consent was obtained must be clear if the list is being used for making marketing calls, texts, or emails.

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Ringbinder full of donations
Charitable donations are often used as a conduit for making bribes

Corporate Giving Policy

While many large corporations strive to support worthy charitable causes across the world as well as the local community, it is important that staff are aware of the types of donations that are acceptable. It is also important that charitable donations made go directly to the charity and are not benefited by a political party or campaign. Charitable donations are often used to make bribes. Therefore, having a charitable and political donations policy in place will help ensure that donations to charities are made appropriately and don’t fall into the wrong hands.

Company Charity & Political Donations Policy Template<

VinciWorks’ charitable and political donations policy can be downloaded for free by clicking the button below. The template can easily be edited to suit your organisation’s industry and procedures. As well as creating a policy, it is also important staff undergo the appropriate anti-bribery training to allow them to identify suspicions of bribery.

Download policy template

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GDPR countdown
Failure to comply with GDPR, coming into force on 25 May, can bring about huge fines, making compliance a must

How many days are there until the General Data Protection Regulation?

VinciWorks is counting down the days until GDPR comes into force, providing a host of resources such as online GDPR training, policy templates and helpful guides. We have also created a GDPR countdown to help you keep track of how long your business has to prepare.

Countdown to GDPR

The GDPR resource page

VinciWorks has created a GDPR resources page that includes all the tools and resources you will need to prepare for GDPR.

The GDPR resource page includes: