It feels like only yesterday Astute was just a glimmer in our eye, but its first birthday is fast approaching – and what a year it’s been!

We set out to address deficiencies in the LMS landscape with an enterprise-level, learner-centric eLearning platform that could be accessed anywhere, on any device. Mission accomplished – as thousands of happy Astute users will attest – but we’re not stopping there.

Compliance training has changed. It’s no longer enough to simply enrol learners onto courses once a year and keep poking them until they’re passed. It might look like compliance – you can export a list showing that every learner completed the training – but actual impact on knowledge and behaviour will be limited. And isn’t that the whole point of compliance training?

We think so, which is why we set our sights on making Astute more than just a really good eLearning Platform. So without further ado, here are six features we’ve added to Astute that make it a better choice for managing compliance than your common or garden LMS.

1. Performance Manager

Making training a mandatory annual event, prescribed to everyone regardless of its relevance or their existing knowledge, is the fastest way to lose learners’ interest. As well as creating bad feeling, delivering training employees don’t actually need is simply not productive.

Rather than delivering generic training to everyone, with Performance Manager you can start the training process with a skills assessment to measure capabilities against job roles. Employees then receive personal learning plans tailored to their own capability gaps, which can consist of eLearning courses, other Astute activities, and offline tasks, too.

2. Policy Manager

Regulations evolve constantly, and it’s vital your organisation is equipped to respond by keeping employees up to date with the latest versions of policies. But managing version control, change history, and keeping track of which employees have signed which policies (as well as who needs to sign new versions) is an administrative challenge.

Not with Policy Manager, which handles all of the above with a robust audit trail and simple mass assignment. Once policies are assigned to employees, it’s easy to keep everyone up to date; policies requiring attention will display directly in their dashboard.

3. Risk Manager

The risk management and assessment processes in your organisation can make the difference between identifying problems before they become serious issues and facing the cost of fixing things after they go wrong. Risk Manager streamlines this process and makes assessments available on mobiles, tablets, and PCs.

As well as providing a robust audit trail, risk areas are easily identifiable at a glance on Astute’s dashboard. Risk Manager allows the creation of bespoke assessments, with custom mitigation outcomes including Astute activities, and just like with courses, stakeholders can be alerted automatically when intervention is required.

4. Self-directed Learning

While it can’t be denied that some subjects require annual training, that doesn’t mean learners should only be able to access them once per year. Especially in compliance subjects, where following correct processes is so important, making training available on demand can make all the difference.

So why aren’t companies doing this already? For starters, the need to enrol learners – then there’s the fact that, when a learner just wants to refresh their memory on one topic, sifting through a full length course is more trouble than it’s worth.

Our Take 5 microlearning modules are designed for this exact reason. They’re the eLearning equivalent of skipping to the chapter you need, without having to read the whole book. And if you choose Astute’s new Open Access portal feature, learners don’t need to be enrolled – or even logged in – to access them.

5. Offline communications

Creating a compliance culture can’t start and end online. If the only time learners see key messages is while completing training courses, they’ll be unlikely to remember them and transfer them to their work.

Astute can help here, too. Each of our off-the-shelf courses comes with a series of associated posters, flyers, and other printed material reinforcing the learning outcomes of the course with memorable messages.

These can be managed and printed directly from Astute. You can even drag and drop your own company logo in for a consistent, branded compliance message – online and offline.

6. Quick Quiz / Surveys

Gaining insight on engagement with your learning and development efforts is a vital part of optimising their impact, but in a typical LMS, completion rate is probably the best metric available for measuring it – and if courses are mandatory, then it doesn’t really tell you anything.

Astute’s integrated surveys make gathering feedback on engagement easy. Create custom surveys and link them to courses, risk assessments, or just make them standalone and open to anyone. You’ll be able to gather, analyse, and report on feedback easily, without needing to set up a separate system and import all of your learners.

Contact us now for a hands on demo of Astute.