How outsourcing compliance training can save your business money

The subscription price is easy to see. The internal cost of building, legally reviewing, maintaining and administering training is often spread across several budgets and overlooked.

By Deborah Coram – CEO, Safetrac

When businesses look for ways to reduce costs, bringing compliance training in-house can seem like a sensible option. You already have people who know the business, a legal team or external advisers, and perhaps a learning platform. Why pay a provider for something you could produce yourselves?

The answer depends on what you include in the calculation. Take workplace health and safety in Australia. It’s easy to think of it as one OHS or WHS course. Depending on your operations, roles and jurisdictions, the programme could span 20 or more courses covering general OHS/WHS, managers’ responsibilities, psychosocial hazards, bullying, sexual harassment and Respect@Work, manual handling and safe lifting, working at heights, slips, trips and falls, hazardous chemicals, asbestos awareness, confined spaces, electrical safety, machinery safety, forklift and vehicle safety, personal protective equipment, noise and hearing protection, fatigue, working alone or remotely, emergency procedures, fire safety, first aid, incident reporting and contractor safety. What looks like one subject in a budget can become a substantial programme, with each course needing appropriate review, monitoring and maintenance.

And that is before you consider the rest of your compliance training library. If you compare a subscription fee with the time it takes someone to write a course, the internal option may look cheaper. But that leaves out much of the work you are taking on.

What does it cost to build a course?

A compliance course needs more than accurate information. Employees need to understand how that information applies to their work and what they are expected to do. Someone has to research and write the content, structure the learning, develop relevant scenarios and create assessments. The material needs to suit the audience and reflect the jurisdictions in which they work. That requires different skills. Your lawyer may understand the obligations, but instructional design is a separate discipline. Your learning team may know how to build an effective course, but they still need someone qualified to assess its legal accuracy.

Depending on the format, production may also involve digital learning developers, graphic designers, video or audio specialists, and accessibility expertise. Authoring tool subscriptions, image and media licences, editing software, and the platform used to deliver the training are also required. Once built, the course needs testing. Assessments must work, completions must be recorded correctly, and employees must be able to access and navigate the material. AI can help with parts of production, but someone still needs to check the output, verify its accuracy and take responsibility for what is published. These costs exist even when your own staff do the work. They are simply absorbed into salaries and software budgets rather than appearing on a training provider’s invoice. And at the end of the process, how do you know the course you’ve built will meet regulators’ needs?

Legal sign-off is the beginning of a commitment

To ensure the course meets your organisation’s obligations under each relevant piece of legislation, your legal team or external advisers need to review each course, identify gaps, and check amendments before signing off on its release. That review establishes the position at a particular point in time. Someone must then remain responsible for monitoring legislation, identifying changes that could affect the content, and updating the courses as legislation changes. Failure to do this will likely mean your internally created content does not meet the regulator’s needs.

If you develop 20 compliance courses, you are effectively committing your organisation to ongoing monitoring across those 20 courses and the relevant jurisdictions. Your legal team needs to understand what the training says, assess developments against it and advise when revisions are required. The content then needs to be amended, reviewed, rebuilt and tested. You also need to decide whether employees who have already completed the training need an update.

In consulting with our content team recently, we established that, as at 12 November, Safetrac had completed updates to 21 courses since January, with another 19 underway. Across the approximately 140 compliance courses we monitor in Australia and New Zealand, that is nearly three in ten, or close to 30%. Those discussions also made clear the sheer volume of legal and regulatory change over the past 12–18 months. It has felt like a constant onslaught. Each development needs to be assessed to determine whether our training needs to change and, if so, how and when.

For organisations already struggling to keep up, that workload comes alongside growing demands in privacy, AI and cyber security, all taking centre stage in their risk assessments and competing for the same legal and compliance resources. Does your internal or external team really have time to oversee all your courses for regulatory change? Indeed, the review cost doesn’t stop there. While we have 40 courses that have needed updates, we have had to monitor all 140 to identify them. A course that hasn’t changed still requires oversight: constant monitoring of the legislation.

For an internal legal team, this is a substantial continuing responsibility. Their time isn’t free simply because they are already employed, and time spent maintaining training is time taken from other business priorities.

Then there is the cost of running the programme

Having a finished course does not mean the work is done. Someone needs to assign the right training to the right employees, manage enrolments, set deadlines and include new starters. Role changes may affect what people need to complete.

Employees need reminders. Outstanding completions need follow-up, sometimes through their managers. There are access issues to resolve, exceptions to manage and reports to prepare. Records need to be maintained so the organisation can establish who completed which training and when.

Multiply that across the courses delivered throughout the year, and it becomes a considerable operational workload. A suitable platform can automate much of the routine administration. Without one, your team may spend hours maintaining spreadsheets, sending emails and reconciling records. Even if you already have a platform, someone still needs to configure and manage the programme.

These responsibilities often sit across legal, HR, learning and development, IT and line management. Because the costs are distributed, nobody necessarily sees the full amount.

Where outsourcing delivers real savings

With Safetrac, you gain access to the people, expertise and systems needed to keep a compliance training programme running. The investment in course development, legal review and ongoing monitoring is shared across our client base, so your organisation doesn’t have to carry those costs alone.
We can also manage the rollout for you. Through our managed service, Safetrac becomes an extension of your team, coordinating the agreed training schedule, allocating courses, managing reminders and reporting on completions. Your people have visibility of progress without having to administer every step themselves.

That continuity matters. When an employee leaves or responsibilities change, your training programme shouldn’t depend on whether someone remembered to hand over a spreadsheet or explain the next round of enrolments. With your training, schedules and completion records managed in one place, the programme can continue through staff changes. Courses are monitored and updated, learning is rolled out regularly, and records are available to help demonstrate your organisation’s training activity to regulators.

For your legal, risk and compliance teams, this creates capacity to focus on the issues that most need their attention. They can concentrate on high-priority risks knowing the agreed training programme is being maintained, checked for accuracy and delivered, with outstanding completions visible for follow-up.

There are savings in employees’ time, too. Safetrac’s Elevated Learning approach uses pre-assessment and targeted legal update blocks to focus learning on what people need to know, reducing unnecessary repetition and time away from their work.

The financial comparison therefore needs to include far more than course production. It needs to account for specialist staff, legal oversight, software licences, maintenance, administration and learner time. It should also recognise the cost of rebuilding knowledge and processes when internal staff move on.

Your organisation retains responsibility for compliance. But it doesn’t have to employ and coordinate every person needed to support its training programme.

Before deciding that in-house delivery is cheaper, put a cost against that full year of work across every team involved. Then compare it with a Safetrac service that can maintain the content, manage delivery and report on completion for you. That is where the value of outsourcing becomes clear: less internal work to fund and manage, greater continuity, and more time for your specialists to address the risks that need them most.