Last month my colleague, Julie Gibbs, wrote an article about Top Trade Compliance initiatives to consider for 2018 to get you on track for the new year out of the gate.

Now is always a great time to be scheduling (or have scheduled!) your trade compliance training calendar for the company. Remember, the entire company should be trained annually on general trade compliance awareness with an emphasis on high risk areas for your company. Certain departments will require more in-depth training such as Operations and Order Management. Whether these are in-person or online trainings, the earlier you plan and coordinate with other company initiatives, the more successful you will be.

Since I am already deep into collaborating with some of you on training strategy for the year, I realized this is a topic that requires a deeper dive for the BPE Global readership.

Where I recommend starting is looking backwards, and ask yourself some questions:

• What training frequency have I committed to? Is this commitment documented in my Internal Controls Program/Export Controls Program manual, a management objective with metrics, or both?
• Have I met those commitments?
• When was the last company-wide trade compliance awareness training?
• What departments have had functional training? When? How was it delivered?
• What departments need functional training and have never had it? What topics are important to cover?
• What topic(s) have I received the most questions about in the last 12 months? Are the answers to those questions covered in existing training, or do I need to update existing training or provide other resources?
• When was the last time I reviewed our ICP/ECP to ensure I have trained on the topics covered?

Once you have the answers to these questions, you can prioritize whether company-wide awareness training or functional training will be the first priority. Next, create a grid in Excel. First, list policies from your Export Control Program (ECP) or Internal Controls Program (ICP) down the rows of Column “A.” Then, identify the other functional groups within your company and list as headers for each separate column across Row A. In each cell within your grid, identify whether the topic would be company-wide training or functional training. Then rank each category based on risk.

The easiest training to deploy fairly quickly is typically the annual awareness training. Consider that the low hanging fruit and get the awareness training out there to the entire company sooner rather than later. Then look at the topics for functional training, and also rank them for risk in combination with the questions you’ve asked yourself. You know which groups have never had training. You also know the groups who desperately need training. You know because you have seen the results of audits you have conducted. Right?

Plan to jump on training topics that you have identified are high risk areas for functional groups. Once you have mapped out the “What” and “When”, the most common question we get asked is how best to deploy the training. This really is a matter of a number of things. How big is your company, what are the geographies and languages to contend with? When you are small, conducting in-person training may be just perfect. As you grow, it may not be feasible. Often there are just one or two trade compliance personnel supporting the entire operation. You may have to pick and choose what topics you have the bandwidth to deploy in-person, and where you need to conduct live webinars, or strive to automate deployment via a learning management system (LMS).

We are definitely seeing a trend toward leveraging learning management systems that companies are already using for their human resources and legal department topics. How awesome is it to develop your content, write a script, record it, and deploy it in an automated fashion via emails to 100 employees or 10,000 employees? This method is great, as most LMS systems track who takes the training, how long they spent on the training, if they passed a comprehension quiz, and can also send reminders, and escalations to those who fail to take the training by a certain deadline, including an email to their boss.

Whether you decide to manage training in-house or outsource all or part of your training needs to BPE Global, the key is to “just do it”! Get started now. Make a plan and put a stake in it!

BPE Global is a global trade consulting and training firm. Renee Roe is a Director of BPE Global. Renee Roe is a Director of BPE Global. You can reach Renee by email at Renee@bpeglobal.com.

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