What Is The Purpose Of Compliance Training

The purpose of compliance training is to do two jobs at once. It shapes how people behave before something goes wrong, and it leaves an evidence trail the organisation can rely on afterwards. Training that only achieves the second is a paper exercise, and Australian regulators have become good at telling the difference.

The prevention job is the obvious one. Nobody can follow a rule they have never been told about, so training sets the standard for conduct, explains the risks specific to the work, and makes clear how to raise a concern. The proof job matters later, when a complaint, an incident or an audit arrives. That is the point at which the questions become who was trained, on what, when, and whether the content matched the actual risk in that workplace.

Some obligations state the purpose in the legislation itself. Under section 912A(1)(f) of the Corporations Act, an Australian financial services licensee must ensure its representatives are adequately trained and competent to provide the services covered by the licence, and ASIC has taken enforcement action on that provision. ASIC’s Regulatory Guide 105 sets out how it assesses the related organisational competence obligation. Financial services is unusual only in how explicit the drafting is. The same logic runs through safety, privacy and conduct regulation.

In practice that purpose is easiest to see when training is mapped to a specific risk:

• Conflicts of interest, so staff recognise and declare one before it turns into a problem
• Competition and consumer law, so front-line teams do not create liability in the way they sell
• Capability mapping, so training is matched to the role instead of issued to everyone by default

Requirements differ across states, territories and industries and change over time, so treat this as general information rather than legal advice. Posts tagged here look at how Australian organisations decide what their training is for, and how they test whether it did the job. To see how a structured programme is built and tracked, browse Sentrient’s compliance training courses and the learning management system behind them.