Do you want to harness the power of eLearning for your organisation?

  • Turn an existing PowerPoint into a SCORM Compliant eLearning Course
  • Add videos and branding to your course
  • Add an assessment (and determine the difficulty and pass mark)
  • Automatically enrol or re enrol specific groups for refresher training
  • Quickly identify those who fail to engage

eLearning can be effective in many areas: Health & Safety, Compliance issues or skills-based training specific to your business. Being able to create and distribute engaging eLearning content is a proven way to engage your employees, give them new skills or keep them updated on specific procedures.

With over 15 years of experience in the eLearning industry and will show you some of the shortcuts to take and pitfalls to avoid when creating an eLearning course yourself.

Image implying money laundering
Under the Fourth Money Laundering Directive, CDD is required by anyone trading goods in cash with a value over €10,000, down from previous amount of €15,000

Customer Due Diligence and Anti-Money Laundering

Ensuring your staff are able to carry out effective customer due diligence goes a long way to ensuring your staff and clients are not are not facilitating money laundering. Such processes to be aware of and understand include submitting a suspicious activity report (SAR), understanding what is required to take a risk based approach and the supporting documents that should be requested from clients. Here is some guidance to carrying out customer due diligence and how to deal with potential red flags.

The guidance is taken from our interactive e-learning course, Anti-Money Laundering: Know Your Risk. You can demo the course for free here. The course is in line with the Fourth and Fifth Money Laundering Directive and will be updated when the Fifth Directive comes into force.

What is customer due diligence?

Customer due diligence is the process of identifying your customers and checking they are who they say they are. In practice, this means obtaining a customer’s name, photograph on an official document which confirms their identity and residential address and date of birth. There are three levels of customer due diligence: standard, simplified and enhanced.

Learn more: VinciWorks’ AML client onboarding and ongoing monitoring software solution

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Health and Safety can be seen as an onerous task. There are forms to fill in and boxes to tick. Companies who view it in this way are failing on multiple counts. Not only should a responsible employer see it as part of their duty of care to provide a safe and healthy working environment, there is also a legal requirement to do so. We look at some areas that might get overlooked and point to the positives of risk assessing employees effectively.

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Why is risk assessing employees important?

Aside from the legal responsibilities, health and safety compliance in the workplace is essential for any successful business, supporting growth, protecting people and enabling innovation. Without it, productivity falls. The statistics are sobering. For example, in the UK, over 11 million days a year are lost to work-related stress, with an estimated economic impact of £5 billion. Musculoskeletal disorders account for over a third of all working days lost due to ill health. This isn’t just from manual handling, awkward or tiring positions whilst at the computer or driving, together with repetitive keyboard work, contribute to this total.1

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What specific areas should I be looking at when risk assessing employees?

As well as the areas of your workplace that might be considered as high-risk for health and safety, there are also a number of people-based aspects that you need to consider. Common activities include: employees driving for work-related purposes (outside of the daily commute); lone working and home working; employees travelling overseas on business; pregnant and returning mothers; staff members with special needs; employees who are new to their job, and those using display screen equipment. In all these cases, you should be confident that you have taken a ‘Plan, Do, Check, Act’ approach:2

  • Plan: set out how you are going to assess and manage risks
  • Do: Prioritise risks, and train your staff to manage them
  • Check: Track your progress
  • Act: Review your performance, and make the required changes

What should I do next?

Our advice is to find a system that will give you the peace of mind that your organisation is doing all it can to ensure a safe and healthy working environment. This means using a system that will:

  • Help you distribute your health and safety policies and ensure they are read and understood
  • Allow you to focus your training on areas that present the greatest risk to your business
  • Measure how well you are doing, in terms of sharing information, training your staff, assessing and managing risks, and
  • Evaluate your performance and make improvements where they’re needed.

The “Assess” module in WorkWize from VinciWorks is designed to help organisations with risk assessing employees effectively. The system will enable you to quickly carry out assessments on large numbers of people. At its heart, WorkWize is a compliance-focused learning management system. It allows the EHS Manager to roll out policies and training to the right groups and see on a dashboard where the non-compliance issues arise.

With the addition of the Assess Module, People based Risk Assessments can also be distributed. The Risk Management process is streamlined for activities like those listed above. The system sends automated email reminders for risk assessment questionnaires, provides configurable advice to enable employees to self-resolve the majority of low-level risks and prioritises risks according to a traffic light system.

Risk data is displayed on a simple reporting dashboard. Now that could move your risk assessment away from mere compliance to adding real value.

WorkWize can be used in tandem with a traditional EHS system like those provided by SHE Software or linked to an HR or Payroll system to create a fully closed-loop compliance system. Linking to core systems means users are set up automatically, the need to re-key user data is eliminated and Training, Policies and Risk Assessments are allocated automatically based on their job role. Risk assessing employees effectively just got easier…

Request a demonstration of WorkWize and a free trial of any of our 40+ eLearning courses

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Article 5 of the General Data Protection Regulation requires demonstrable compliance with the new regulations. With GDPR now in force, ensuring your staff are aware of your organisation’s data protection policies is now more important than ever.

Data protection changes under GDPR

Are you familiar with GDPR? Does your organisation have a process for data portability? GDPR legislation now allows individuals to obtain and reuse their personal data for their own purposes across different services. Other changes include the requirement for certain organisations to appoint a Data Protection Officer. Further, under GDPR, sensitive information now includes biometric and genetic information. This means that organisations should familiarise themselves with GDPR and ensure staff understand how to process personal data.
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Sanctions list
The new allows for the UK to add or remove people, entities and organisations from targeted sanctions list if there are reasonable grounds to suspect involvement in activities that can trigger sanctions

The UK parliament recently enacted a new piece of sanctions and money laundering legislation designed to Brexit-proof the UK’s ability to implement international and European sanctions. To help organisations comply, VinciWorks has released a brand new scenario based training course Sanctions: Know Your Transaction. Following the success of our anti-bribery and anti-money laundering training, this course drops users into a set of immersive scenarios to test their knowledge, understanding and ability to comply with the new sanctions law.

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Tune into any news channel on any day of the week and you’re likely to hear about the problems afflicting UK productivity. What’s causing them? One reason is a mismatch of skills. In this post, we look at the current skills challenges and the role eLearning can potentially play in addressing them.

The challenge for UK skills

Recent reports looking at recruitment and skills in the UK demonstrate that there is a real challenge for employers. Whilst employment rates are at a record high, businesses report that they are struggling to find the right workers.

Some Examples:

Hardhat Clouds Construction Sky Brick Layer Man
  • 60% of construction SMEs – businesses with fewer than 250 employees – say they are having trouble hiring bricklayers,
  • 58% say they can’t find the right carpenters and joiners,
  • 45% say they’re facing challenges employing plumbers.

In fact, 40% of construction SMEs report that skills shortages are at their highest since 2013. Research carried out by Totaljobs, which surveyed 1,355 employers, found that nearly two-thirds of employers believed that their businesses would suffer because workers lacked key skills. And over half of these employers concluded that the skills gap would mean that the UK would no longer be able to compete on the global stage. In fact, according to the Local Government Agency, by 2024 there will be a shortage of 4 million highly skilled workers and 6 million low skilled workers working within the UK economy.

Why is this happening?

That’s hard to say for certain, but recent studies point to two core reasons. The first is education. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, (OECD), measures educational attainment across its member countries. The UK is ranked 20th globally for attainment in English and math, with a fifth of young adults below a basic level. The UK Commission for Employment and Skills has predicted that the proportion of the adult population qualified to intermediate level is likely to fall to 34% by 2020, placing the UK 28th out of the 32 OECD nations.

The potential Brexit effect?

  • First, people are worried about the future, so are staying in their jobs for longer. This means that there are less available skills in the recruitment pool.
  • UK government restrictions on migrants mean that fewer people are coming into the country to take up vacancies.
  • Studies have shown that as many as a third of non-UK workers are thinking about leaving the country in the next five years.

Why does the skills gap pose such a problem?

Simply put productivity. The UK government has estimated that better skills could improve productivity by 20 percent. There are other reasons, too. Recruitment is taking longer. Companies are making more use of recruitment agencies and temporary staff. Finding the right people often means offering higher wages. All this means that the skills gap is costing firms money. Estimates put this cost at as high as £2 billion per year.

What can we do – a role for eLearning?

The skills gap is a clearly a long-term challenge for the UK economy. And there are long and short-term ways to address it. One would be for UK companies to work more closely with schools and colleges, to make sure the skills being taught are those required in the workplace. This will take time.

A quicker course of action is for companies to invest much more in training. This shift in focus would mean that businesses would be better placed to upskill their existing employees and cast their net more widely, looking to other professions to recruit new staff and offering training packages that develop the specific skills they need. Such an approach is already being seen. The British Chamber of Commerce Quarterly Economic Survey shows that both the manufacturing and services sectors have increased their investment in training in 2018, by 22 percent and 18 percent respectively. eLearning is becoming a focus for training investment. Partly, this is due to the generational shift in the workforce with Gen Y and Z  being digital natives and expecting to learn from screens rather than whiteboards. eLearning is also more agile, and better able to keep pace with the constantly changing technology that is present in today’s workplace.

Delivering in-house training through eLearning

This investment calls for a new approach to delivering in-house training, one that focuses on company-specific, rather than generic, needs. That’s where VinciWorks can help. Our approach couples a Learning Management System – used to deliver the content – with a rapid authoring tool – used to write the content. This means that each company is in control of the content they deliver. The authoring tool enables subject experts within your company to create bite-sized chunks of training materials, couched within your specific culture and context. These chunks can then be delivered through the LMS, which can also track who’s taken part, and how well they’ve understood the information. This saves money and time. But, more importantly, it puts you in control of your training.

Plan for the long term but react to the short term

Building Education Studying School University

Obviously, eLearning is not the answer when it comes to equipping the next generation of Bricklayers, Carpenters or Plumbers, with the practical skills they need to do their job.  However, if you are hiring people with scarce skills training counts. Having a comprehensive internal training programme that includes Health & Safety, Compliance topics and company-specific learning on values and culture is a way to show your employees that they are valued and reduce turnover while increasing productivity. A well thought out programme will also help in the battle for talent when applicants have choices on the table and are looking beyond the salary and at the company as a whole.

There is an urgent need for employers to engage in longer-term training partnerships involving government, schools, colleges and trade bodies. In the short term, the priority should be controlling your environment and ensuring employees are inducted correctly – trained and invested in from day one.

So, if you need to address a skills gap in your business, get in touch today. Our solutions could be just what you need. We offer over 40 pre-written courses, however, they are all editable by you, so they can be made specific to your companies culture, language and procedures.

If you would like to learn more about creating eLearning content for your organisation, why not register for our free webinar:

“Micro-Learning: Can you create an eLearning course in less than 30 Minutes?”

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Sanctions knowledge check screenshot

VinciWorks has just released a new five-minute knowledge check that tests users’ knowledge of the sanctions regulations and is in line with the Sanctions and Money Laundering Act. The knowledge check uses scenarios to help users understand the best course of action to take in different situations. The knowledge check is part of the Sanctions training suite, which includes the latest course, Sanctions: Know Your Transaction, and can also be purchased alone.

VinciWorks’ knowledge check series

While staff must be aware of the latest laws and regulations, as well as best practice, it is important that they refresh their knowledge every so often. VinciWorks’ knowledge checks allow businesses to verify and assess your staff’s knowledge of key compliance areas. We are therefore continually adding new knowledge checks to our training suites and have provided a way for businesses to create their own as well.

View knowledge check series

Geurnsey, one of the Crown Dependencies

UK’s Sanctions and AML Act 2018

The UK’s Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Act 2018 is a legislative framework that strengthens the country’s ability to implement sanctions and AML measures. The act provides the legal basis for the UK government to impose and enforce sanctions on individuals, entities, and countries deemed to pose a threat to national security or involved in illicit activities. The act expands the powers of the relevant authorities to investigate, prevent, and prosecute money laundering offences and reinforces cooperation and information sharing between public and private sectors.

Impact of UK’s Sanctions and AML Act 2018 on Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories

Impact of the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering 2018 Act on the Crown Dependencies and British Overseas Territories

Following an amendment to the recently enacted Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act which will introduce public ownership registers in British Overseas Territories, the amendments sponsors Andrew Mitchell and Dame Margaret Hodge will visit the Isle of Man to persuade the government to create a publicly accessible register of beneficial ownership.

Currently, the Manx Government’s central register is only accessible to law enforcement and tax officials, but the UK government is keen for the Crown Dependencies to adopt the approach being set out in the EU’s Fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directive.

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Sccreenshot of the GDPR knowledge check
The GDPR knowledge check presents instant feedback after the user has answered a question

Verify and assess your staff’s knowledge of key compliance areas such as GDPR, anti-money laundering, anti-bribery and cyber security with our new series of five-minute knowledge checks. Each knowledge check presents 10 questions, with feedback automatically given after each question is answered. Distribute the knowledge checks across your organisation to evaluate the level of understanding, allowing you to decide on next steps for training procedures. Feedback is given after each question is answered, allowing users to improve their knowledge while completing the assessment.

The knowledge checks are included in the licence of any training suite relating to that topic and are available immediately. To learn more, contact us.

Free knowledge check demos

Below are just some of the demos to our knowledge checks. Alternatively, view our full suite here.

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