Skillsoft’s Compliance Training

Solution Promotes A Culture Of

EHS Leadership

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Skillsoft’s Compliance Training Solution Promotes A Culture Of EHS Leadership

This report is one in a series covering prominent software vendors in the digitized EHS training market.

Founded in 1998, Skillsoft is a corporate learning provider focused on worker protection. Skillsoft is unique for

its flexible training bundles across the topic areas of EHS, legal compliance, technical and professional

leadership. Since the firm’s strategic acquisition of SumTotal, Skillsoft also has enhanced its workforce

management capability and opened a new window of opportunity for innovating in the space of user-specific

on-demand training. Skillsoft’s range of training compliance platforms can particularly benefit firms that seek to

influence a mature EHS compliance culture by linking EHS training with professional skills and leadership

training.

TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

Skillsoft’s Compliance Training Solution Promotes A Culture Of EHS Leadership .................................................. 3

Skillsoft Aligns Global Training Offering With Local EHS Compliance Requirements

Skillsoft Unites EHS, Leadership And Professional Training Management

Skillsoft’s Bundled Learning Offering Influences A Mature EHS Compliance Culture

O R G A N I Z A T I O N S M E N T I O N E D

Baker Donelson, Cardno, Chilworth, Domtar, Ensafe, Gordon Dadds, Occupational Safety and Health

Administration (OSHA), Pinchin Environmental, Skillsoft, SumTotal, Winn Forensics, Workday.

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Skillsoft’s Compliance Training Solution Promotes A Culture Of EHS

Leadership

Skillsoft, headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, was founded in 1998 as a corporate learning provider focused on

worker protection. The firm currently has 2,300 employees located across 13 offices globally and 1,900

customers across 32 countries. To discover what Skillsoft offers for EHS training management, we spoke with

Vice President and General Manager John Arendes and Vice President of Operations Norman Ford. We also

spoke to representatives of two of Skillsoft’s customers: HSE Director at Cardno, an infrastructure and

environmental services firm with $1 billion in annual revenue, and Learning Management System (LMS)

Administrator at Domtar, a pulp and paper manufacturing firm with approximately $6 billion in annual revenue.

Skillsoft Aligns Global Training Offering With Local EHS Compliance

Requirements

Skillsoft is unique for its flexible training bundles across the topic areas of EHS, legal compliance, professional

learning and leadership development. We learned that Skillsoft has:

• Created training content and software for managing learning in 500 risk areas.

Skillsoft’s training content — Skillsoft Compliance — offers compliance training across over 500 different

risk areas including workplace safety and health, environment, transportation and security, as well as

broader legal coverage, ethics and leadership training. Comprised of approximately 2,500 courses, the

training content is leveraged through multiple platforms, the most current being Percipio Compliance.

Skillsoft’s platforms can also leverage third-party training content; such is the case with Cardno

leveraging third party safety training content.

• Partnered with legal and safety matter experts globally.

Skillsoft has allocated subject matter experts to keep Skillsoft Compliance up to date with federal, state

and local government regulations across the 32 countries where its customers are located. Experts with

whom Skillsoft collaborates to produce training content include legal services firms, such as Baker

Donelson and Gordon Dadds, and safety services firms such as Chilworth, Ensafe, Pinchin Environmental

and Winn Forensics.

• Acquired SumTotal in 2014 to add workforce management capabilities.

In September 2014, Skillsoft made a strategic move to acquire SumTotal, a learning and workforce

management software provider. What did this mean for Skillsoft? Whilst growth was an obvious result,

Skillsoft added workforce management capabilities — including scheduling and validating required

training certifications — and opened a new window of opportunity for innovating in the space of user-

specific, on-demand training.

Skillsoft Unites EHS, Leadership And Professional Training Management

Skillsoft offers compliance training software and content covering 500 risk areas, including workplace safety,

security and transportation. Since its launch, Skillsoft has built a network of partnerships with legal and safety

subject matter experts, and strategically acquired SumTotal to expand its EHS resources and capabilities.

Unique aspects of Skillsoft’s platforms include its:

• Flexible curricula that bundle EHS, legal compliance, professional and leadership training.

Training curricula on Skillsoft’s platforms bundle EHS, legal, professional and technical skills, as well as

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leadership training. The EHS training content aligns with leadership training by adapting the course to an

individual’s seniority. For example, a senior leadership course on safety teaches the actions that a

manager or director should take in a specific situation, such as when reporting a safety incident. The

flexibility of bundling different courses into one curriculum allows individuals who require certain

machine operating skills training to access any and all compliance courses on the same platform.

“We have an EHS training library that includes courses related to workplace skills. A worker can request

permission to take any of the non-compliance-related training courses. We are seeing workers interested in

skills development and expanding their capabilities inside the company.” (HSE Director, Cardno)

• Localized content for EHS training.

EHS training content offered by Skillsoft adheres to an individual country’s regulations, language and

culture. Skillsoft not only translates the content to the local language but develops location-specific

scenarios in the learning course such as images or videos of scenarios relevant to lockout-tagout, or

confined space. The familiar workplace scenes create a visual impact on the user that is more likely to

change one’s behaviours.

“We have used Skillsoft Advanced Compliance for four years in our Americas locations and we have

improved by 20% our compliance with training requirements, maintaining over 90% compliance.” (HSE

Director, Cardno)

• Micro-learning accessible on mobile devices.

Skillsoft offers short video-based content accessible on mobile devices. These short snippets of

information have runtimes between two and five minutes and are particularly useful as memory boosters.

For example, Domtar uses micro-learning as a job aid, a refresher for a longer training course, and even a

printed guidance note during safety meetings.

“We have 100 people working in the field and they are doing their training on tablets. This has been a huge

help for us.” (HSE Director, Cardno)

• Precise assignment of training aligned with user-specific activities and location.

Skillsoft’s platforms assign training content based on user-specific attributes, including the regional

location, business unit and role. For example, training for a forklift driver of a specific manufacturing line

or training for correct application of protective machine guards. How is training automatically assigned to

specific roles? Skillsoft’s workforce management capability includes functionality for enterprise resource

planning (ERP) integration. Witness Cardno, which utilizes Workday as an HR system integrated with its

Skillsoft 8i platform to automatically program training courses for new employees.

“Currently, our LMS is one of our biggest repositories for HR information. We populated Skillport 8i with our

HR database from day one.” (LMS Administrator, Domtar)

• Mapping of training content to an organization’s EHS risks.

Skillsoft works with an individual customer to identify priority EHS risks in the organization and develop

the appropriate training assignment schedule. For example, the firm would assign training to prevent

slips and falls in a manufacturing facility that recently has experienced a safety incident. Skillsoft’s

Percipio Compliance platform includes a compliance questionnaire tool, available in 40 languages, for

surveying individuals on a relevant compliance topic. The results from these questionnaires add a layer of

risk management by assigning training for topics identified as high-risk within the survey responses.

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“Each year, we look at the top types of safety incidents and evaluate if the training is satisfactory to prevent

future incidents from occurring.” (LMS Administrator, Domtar)

Skillsoft’s Bundled Learning Offering Influences A Mature EHS Compliance

Culture

Skillsoft’s compliance training platforms allow curriculum building that combines EHS, leadership and technical

training. The platforms also offer localized content, mobile access that includes micro-learning courses, and

training specific to user’s activities, EHS risks and location. With these characteristics in mind, which firms are a

good fit for Skillsoft’s offerings? A firm that would benefit most is one that seeks to:

• Influence a mature EHS compliance culture in its employees.

At whichever stage of EHS compliance maturity that firms find themselves, adopting Skillsoft Compliance

can influence EHS performance improvements that enhance bottom-line operations. Linking EHS training

with professional skills and leadership training introduces a forward-looking mindset that treats EHS

management as a skill that is necessary for a worker to perform effectively within one’s role. As a result,

this perspective treats EHS as an integral part of an organization’s culture.

• Manage regionally disparate training requirements.

Mandatory training varies across regions in line with region-specific regulations. For example, a global

chemical firm with business units scattered across the US and Europe needs to manage training

requirements that align with OSHA (in the case of the US) and REACH regulations (in the case of Europe).

Whilst broadcasting webinars on required training topics can be an effective form of communication,

ensuring that individuals have retained the learnings adequately is a big challenge. Adopting a platform

such as Percipio Compliance allows access to gamification techniques to test knowledge as well as

tracking and automated e-mail notifications to ensure that workers remain up to date with country-

specific training requirements.

• Enhance competency management using data analytics.

If there is one area of EHS training that is high risk to a customer’s operations, such as confined space,

then analytics around this competency can identify patterns of weaknesses and potentially reinforce

specific concepts geared to the individual. For example, Skillsoft’s platform can track whether workers are

completing training content and issue notifications if they are overdue for such tasks.

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