Governance Risk Management & Compliance

Do You Need GRC Training In Your Organisation

Wraps up in 16 Minutes

Author: Gavin Altus

Published On August 18, 2026

Quick Answer:

Almost every Australian organisation needs some form of GRC training in your organisation, but not the same amount and not for the same reasons. The honest test is not whether you are large enough. It is whether you could show, today, that the people making decisions about governance, risk and compliance were equipped to make them. There is no single Australian law requiring a course called GRC training. What exists instead are several separate duties, each of which expects training as part of meeting it, and each of which is enforced by a different regulator.

In this guide

How to tell if you need GRC training in your organisation
What is GRC training?
Who needs what
4 reasons to provide GRC training
What the law actually requires
What constitutes effective GRC training
How GRC software helps
6 signs it is not working
Bringing it together
Frequently asked questions

Compliance training is rarely anyone’s favourite part of the week. It can feel mundane and time-consuming, and the people who most need it are usually the people with the least room in their day.

It also does real work. Done properly it keeps a business operating within the rules, and it improves employee performance, workplace culture and day-to-day operations along the way.

The question this guide answers is narrower and more practical: does your organisation need GRC training in your organisation at all, who needs it, and how much.

This guide covers Australian obligations. Work health and safety duties vary between states and territories, and Victoria operates under separate legislation.

How To Tell If You Need GRC Training In Your Organisation

Start with the test rather than the answer. Work through these six questions honestly. Each one is a place where the absence of training becomes visible.

The question	If the answer is no
Could you show what your managers were told about their obligations, and when?	You are relying on people having absorbed it, which is not evidence of anything
Does everyone know how to raise a concern, and what happens next?	Your reporting rate is lower than your incident rate, and the gap is invisible
Do the people handling personal information know what they may and may not do with it?	Privacy exposure sits with individuals rather than with a process
Have your officers been briefed on their personal due diligence duty?	A duty that cannot be delegated is being carried by people unaware they hold it
When policy changed last, did anyone confirm people had read the change?	Your acknowledgements describe an earlier version of the business
If a regulator asked tomorrow, how long to produce the training records?	This is the question that actually decides how an audit goes

The realistic answer

Almost every organisation needs some GRC training in your organisation, and very few need all of it at the same depth for every person. The useful question is not whether you need it but where the depth should sit, which is the role matrix further down.

What Is GRC Training?

GRC stands for governance, risk and compliance. Those are three connected parts of a business, and governance, risk and compliance training exists to make sure the people doing the work understand their part of it.

Component	What it covers	What training looks like
Governance	How decisions are made, who is accountable, and how that is documented	Delegations, decision records, board and officer obligations
Risk	Identifying financial and operational threats in advance and managing them	Hazard identification, the risk register, escalation and control review
Compliance	Following internal and external rules while running the business	The obligations that apply to a person’s role, and what evidence to leave behind

In practice this is delivered at onboarding, with refresher training whenever policies or obligations change.

Typical subject areas include work health and safety, workplace bullying, equal employment opportunity and privacy.

For the full picture of which courses are required in Australia and New Zealand, see mandatory compliance training.

Who Needs GRC Training, And How Much

This is where most organisations either overspend or underspend on GRC training in your organisation.

Everyone gets the same course, which is too much for some people and nowhere near enough for others.

Group	What they need	Why
All workers	Work health and safety, bullying, discrimination and sexual harassment, privacy basics, and how to raise a concern	These are the obligations that attach to being at work at all
Supervisors and team leaders	The above, plus receiving a report, what to escalate and when, and stop-work authority	Their acts and omissions affect everyone whose work they direct
Managers	The above, plus investigation basics, procedural fairness, and managing performance without creating a claim	This layer makes the decisions that later get examined
Officers and directors	Due diligence obligations, resourcing, and what assurance to ask for	A personal duty that cannot be delegated
Finance and payroll	Award interpretation, superannuation timing, record-keeping	Underpayment exposure is concentrated here, and it is now a criminal matter where intentional
Anyone handling personal information	Collection limits, disclosure, retention and breach response	Privacy penalties are now scaled to turnover
Regulated professions	Sector obligations, including AML/CTF where it applies	From 1 July 2026 AUSTRAC regulates legal, accounting, conveyancing, real estate and precious metals services

The row people skip

Officers and directors. It is the smallest group, the hardest to schedule, and the only one with a duty that is personal and non-delegable. An organisation that has trained everyone except the people carrying personal liability has the priority upside down.

4 Reasons To Provide GRC Training

1. Enabling process continuity

GRC training is a knowledge management process. It teaches people the practices your organisation relies on, across every team that touches them.

Without it, those practices live in individuals. When someone leaves, the process goes with them, and the gap usually appears at the worst moment.

Training every new starter is what keeps the process continuous rather than personal.

2. Meeting obligations that expect training

Several duties expect training as part of meeting them, and each is enforced separately. The detail is in the next section, because this is the point the internet most often gets wrong.

3. Boosting efficiency

People work faster when they know the rule rather than guessing at it. Most of the time lost to compliance is not the training, it is the checking, the asking, and the rework when somebody guessed wrong.

4. Reducing cost

The cost side is usually argued badly, with an unverifiable figure attached. The honest version is that the avoidable costs are visible and specific:

Remediation after an underpayment, which now scales with the size of the underpayment
Investigation and legal cost after a conduct complaint, which is incurred whatever the outcome
Workers’ compensation exposure, where psychological injury claims are among the most expensive
Reconstructing records after the fact, which is the cost nobody budgets for and everyone pays

A wider version of this argument, covering pay, privacy and conduct together, is set out in the seven steps good businesses take to mitigate the risk of non-compliance.

What The Law Actually Requires

Worth being precise about this

No single Australian statute mandates a course called GRC training. You will occasionally see the opposite asserted, and the imprecision is unhelpful, because a claim that is easy to disprove makes the real obligations easier to dismiss. What actually exists is a set of separate duties, each enforced by a different regulator, and each of which expects training as part of meeting it.

The duty	What it expects	Who enforces it
Primary work health and safety duty	Safe Work Australia describes it as including the provision of any instruction, training, information and supervision that is necessary	State and territory WHS regulators
Positive duty under the Sex Discrimination Act	Reasonable and proportionate measures to eliminate sexual harassment and sex discrimination. Training is a standard element	Australian Human Rights Commission
Officer due diligence	Keeping knowledge current and verifying that resources and processes are used. A personal duty	WHS regulators
Workplace laws and pay	Not a training mandate, and intentional underpayment is now a criminal offence, so payroll capability is a real exposure	Fair Work Ombudsman
Privacy obligations	Not a training mandate, and the first civil penalty under the Privacy Act was $5.8 million in October 2025	OAIC
Sector-specific regimes	Some carry explicit training and screening requirements, including AML/CTF from 1 July 2026	AUSTRAC and sector regulators

The practical consequence of this structure is that you cannot discharge the obligation by buying one course.

You meet it by knowing which duties apply to which of your people, and being able to show what each of them was told.

What Constitutes Effective GRC Training

Three things separate GRC training in your organisation that changes behaviour from GRC training that produces a completion tick.

These are the ones specific to GRC. The general design principles that apply to any compliance course are covered in the five components of workplace compliance training.

1. Knowing who needs what

Covered in the role matrix above, and it is the first decision rather than a refinement. Depth should follow exposure.

A payroll officer and a warehouse supervisor face different obligations, and a course built for both serves neither.

2. Scope for modification

GRC content dates faster than almost any other training, because the obligations underneath it keep moving. Two changed on 1 July 2026 alone.

That makes editability a structural requirement rather than a convenience.

If updating a module means going back to a provider and waiting, the content will be out of date for the period that matters most, which is immediately after a change.

The version question

When content changes, you need to be able to show what a person was told at the time, not what the current version says. That means keeping the version against the completion record. It is the detail most often missing and the one that decides whether an old acknowledgement is worth anything.

3. Keeping GRC courses relatable

Participants have to recognise the examples. Scenarios drawn from an industry your people have never worked in, or a regulatory environment that is not Australian, teach the tone rather than the obligation.

The test is simple: could a worker point to a situation in your workplace that the scenario resembles? If not, the content is information rather than training.

How GRC Software Helps

Running GRC processes manually is slow and error-prone, and the errors are the kind that surface at audit rather than at the time.

For GRC training in your organisation specifically, software does four things that matter.

What it does	Why it matters
Delivers training wherever people are	Shift, field, remote and home-based workers complete it without being taken off the job
Records completion against a named person, with a date and a content version	This is the record a regulator, insurer or court asks for
Automates reminders and escalates non-completion	Removes the manual chase, which is the step that always slips
Reports by department and role	Shows where exposure concentrates rather than an organisation-wide average that hides it

The reporting point is the one that connects training to governance.

Officers cannot exercise due diligence on information they never receive, and completion data by team is one of the more straightforward things to put in front of them.

Where this sits in a wider programme is covered in the role of compliance training in your GRC strategy.

6 Signs Your GRC Training Is Not Working

Sign	What it usually means
Completion is high and reports have not changed	People finished the course without learning what to raise or how
Managers complete after their teams, or not at all	The most common pattern, and it tells everyone below what the standard really is
The same issue keeps recurring	The training is not addressing the actual failure point
Nobody can say which version somebody completed	Old acknowledgements cannot be relied on, because you cannot show what they agreed to
Content has not changed since it was purchased	Obligations moved and the training did not
Producing a record takes days	The training may be fine. The evidence is not, and that is what gets tested

The last row is the one worth measuring, because almost nobody does. Pick one person and one obligation, and time how long it takes to produce proof they were trained on it.

That number tells you more about your exposure than any completion percentage.

Bringing It Together

Almost every Australian organisation needs GRC training in your organisation in some form. The question worth spending time on is not whether, but who and how much.

There is no single law requiring a course by that name.

There are several duties that expect training as part of meeting them, enforced by different regulators, and they attach to different people in your business.

That is why a single course for everybody is both too much and not enough.

If you do one thing after reading this, run the timing test. Pick one person and one obligation, and see how long it takes to produce evidence they were trained on it.

If the answer is more than a few minutes, the gap is in your records rather than your training, and that is a much cheaper problem to fix.

Match the training to the people who carry the duty

Sentrient delivers legally endorsed governance, risk and compliance courses and records completion, acknowledgement and content version against named people, with reporting by department so officers can see what they are being asked to verify.

Explore the GRC training courses | Book a free demonstration

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Do you need GRC training in your organisation?

Almost certainly some, though rarely the same depth for everyone. The practical test is whether you could show today that the people making governance, risk and compliance decisions were equipped to make them. If you cannot produce that evidence for your managers, officers, payroll staff or anyone handling personal information, that is where the need sits.

2. Is GRC training a legal requirement in Australia?

There is no single Australian law mandating a course called GRC training. Several separate duties expect training as part of meeting them: the primary work health and safety duty includes providing the instruction, training, information and supervision that is necessary; the positive duty under the Sex Discrimination Act requires reasonable and proportionate measures; and officers hold a personal due diligence duty. Some sectors carry explicit requirements. Confirm your position with the relevant regulator.

3. What is GRC training?

Training that covers the three connected parts of governance, risk and compliance: how decisions are made and who is accountable, how threats are identified and managed, and how internal and external rules are followed and evidenced. It is usually delivered at onboarding and refreshed when policies or obligations change, and typically covers work health and safety, bullying, equal employment opportunity and privacy.

4. Who in an organisation needs GRC training?

All workers need the baseline. Supervisors need that plus how to receive a report and what to escalate. Managers need investigation basics and procedural fairness. Officers and directors need their due diligence obligations, which are personal and cannot be delegated. Payroll needs award interpretation and superannuation timing. Anyone handling personal information needs privacy obligations. Regulated professions carry sector requirements on top.

5. How often should GRC training be refreshed?

On triggers rather than only annually. A change in obligations, a policy change, a role change, an incident that tested the training, and onboarding are all triggers. GRC content dates faster than most training because the obligations underneath it keep moving, so the ability to edit content quickly matters more here than in other subject areas.

6. What makes GRC training effective?

Three things specific to GRC: matching depth to role rather than giving everyone the same course, being able to modify content quickly when obligations change, and using scenarios people recognise from their own workplace. Beyond those, the general design principles apply, including short modules, plain Australian English, and a record that captures who completed what version and when.

7. Can GRC software deliver the training as well as track it?

Yes, and the tracking is usually the more valuable half. Software delivers training to shift, field and remote workers without taking them off the job, records completion against a named person with a date and content version, automates reminders and escalation for non-completion, and reports by department and role so leadership can see where exposure concentrates.

8. What happens if we do not provide GRC training?

There is no penalty for skipping a course called GRC training, because no law requires one by that name. The exposure is indirect and real: without it you are less able to show you took reasonable steps, which is the test applied under the positive duty, and less able to evidence officer due diligence. Where a duty is not met and harm follows, the absence of training is usually part of the finding rather than the whole of it.

Disclaimer: This article is general information, not legal advice. Training obligations vary between states and territories, and by industry and role. Confirm your obligations with the relevant regulator or a qualified adviser before acting.