Mandatory employee training can feel like a chore. But skipping it simply isn’t an option for organizations that want to ensure their staff remain informed and compliant with fast evolving compliance and security best practices.
From cybersecurity awareness to AI ethics, data privacy, and ESG reporting, organizations face increasing regulatory expectations across multiple fronts. Laws and guidelines that dictate rules around company and employee conduct are pushing companies to demonstrate compliance through verifiable training records.
Add in the complexities of managing hybrid and remote workforces, and delivering the right training to the right roles—on time and with documentation—has become a high-stakes, resource-intensive challenge.
Despite this growing pressure to maintain compliance across the workforce, however, a majority of respondents to an HR.com survey said they struggled with providing adequate support to their teams. Education and training were the leading issues (46%) followed closely by having the right tools and technologies (39%).
But while challenges with enabling employee training exist, the good news is that modern learning platforms are making it easier to build, deliver, and track mandatory training without overwhelming your team.
This guide breaks down six simple steps to roll out mandatory employee training at scale—plus new tools to keep your program efficient, personalized, and audit-proof.
How to implement mandatory training for employees
If you’re looking to provide mandatory training for your employees, here are the 6 steps you’ll need.
- Select a Learning Management System (LMS)
- Map training requirements to job roles
- Create or acquire a training curriculum
- Add users and communication expectations
- Provide certifications to participants
- Record and report training progress
Delivering mandatory training for employees is straightforward using a Learning Management System (LMS). This software allows you to plan, create and administer your mandatory training for employees all in one place.
Read on for our step-by-step guide to mandatory training for employees using an LMS.
What is mandatory training for employees?
Mandatory training—also known as compliance training—is instruction required by an organization to ensure employees meet workplace policies, safety regulations, and legal standards.
This type of training is often required by law, company policy, or industry certification bodies. It helps reduce risk, support employee safety, and ensure operational consistency.
Examples of mandatory employee training include:
- Cybersecurity awareness (e.g., phishing prevention)
- Harassment and discrimination prevention
- Workplace safety (OSHA)
- AI ethics and data privacy compliance
- Food safety and hygiene (for hospitality businesses)
Industries and jurisdictions will vary in their exact requirements. For example, a financial services company may prioritize anti-money laundering (AML) training, while a software firm may focus on data privacy regulations like CPRA or GDPR.
Research has shown that mandatory training can reduce workplace incidents and improve employee safety attitudes—especially when learners perceive the training as relevant and engaging.
Related: How To Implement Employee Training And Development
What’s the difference between Statutory vs Mandatory training?
You might be wondering what is the difference between statutory vs mandatory training. The difference lies in who requires the training and how it’s enforced.
Let’s break it down.
Mandatory training meaning:
Mandatory training is training an organization deems essential to meet internal policies, reduce risk, or comply with regulatory expectations. While not always legally required, it’s considered necessary for safe, ethical, and consistent operations.
Examples of mandatory training include:
- Health and safety
- First aid
- Diversity, equality, and inclusion
- Security
- Customer care
- Complaints handling
- Conflict resolution
- Record keeping and data management
- Raising concerns
Now we’ve established what mandatory training is, here’s a look at the statutory training meaning.
Statutory training meaning:
Statutory training is required by law and must be delivered to ensure compliance with national or regional health and safety regulations. Failure to deliver statutory training can result in legal liability or fines.
Here are some examples of statutory training:
- Local authority health and safety
- Fire safety awareness
- Control of substances hazardous to health
- Basic risk assessment
- Reporting of injuries, diseases, and dangerous occurrences
Related: 5 Steps to Kickstart Your Online Employee Education Program
How to deliver eLearning mandatory training with an LMS
Mandatory training is essential for the smooth and effective running of your business.
But it can be difficult to find the best way to deliver training to ensure that it doesn’t become an unnecessary drain on resources and time. This is where a Learning Management System (LMS) can be really helpful.
If you’re wondering how to implement mandatory training for employees, here are our 6 easy steps:
1. Select a Learning Management System (LMS)
The first step to implementing mandatory training is choosing a Learning Management System (LMS) that can support your organization’s compliance, tracking, and scalability needs.
Before selecting a platform, connect with key stakeholders in HR, L&D, and compliance to align on goals. Consider not only course creation workflows, but also how the system will help you demonstrate training completion, schedule recertifications, and respond to audit requests.
Look for LMS features that support:
- Compliance reporting and downloadable audit trails
- Automated reminders for recertifications and policy reviews
- AI-enhanced content creation for quizzes, modules, and assessments
- AI-powered chat and teaching assistants to to answer learner questions and reduce support burden
- Personalized learning paths based on learner role, risk level, or regulatory framework
- User-friendly course management and scalability for hybrid or remote teams
- Advanced analytics to monitor completions, identify gaps, and track certification readiness
Take a look at our step-by-step guide to choosing the right LMS for you.
2. Map training requirements to job roles
Not all mandatory training applies equally to all employees. To stay compliant and avoid wasting time, you’ll need to map training requirements by department, role, and risk level.
Start with a skills and compliance assessment. Identify what regulations apply to each job function and assess whether current knowledge levels meet the required standards.
From there, define training goals for each group and build role-specific learning paths. This will form the foundation of your mandatory training program.
Many modern LMS platforms support:
- Automated training path assignment based on job title or team
- Dynamic learner journeys that adapt based on performance or recertification status
- In-course assessments to determine whether a refresher is needed
An LMS allows you to track and assess employee training on a rolling basis. In-built assessments help you to establish whether or not employees have the required standard of training needed for their job or if they need a refresher or additional training.
Pro tip: AI-enhanced LMS platforms can now recommend training content automatically, flagging knowledge gaps and streamlining course delivery at scale
3. Create or acquire a training curriculum
Once your training objectives are defined by role or regulation, the next step is to build—or source—your training content.
For common compliance topics like harassment prevention, data privacy, or workplace safety, many LMS platforms allow you to import pre-built, standards-aligned courses that can be customized to reflect your internal policies and brand.
For training that’s unique to your organization—such as employee onboarding, code of conduct, or internal systems—you may need to build your curriculum from scratch. Fortunately, many platforms now support AI-powered content creation tools to help you generate quizzes, draft lesson modules, and even surface knowledge gaps based on your inputs.
With the Thinkific course builder, you can quickly upload, drag and drop content for your curriculum. This allows you to tailor a pre-built curriculum to your organization.
Tip: Whether you’re creating from scratch or customizing pre-existing courses, make sure your curriculum aligns with relevant compliance standards and includes in-course assessments to verify retention. Use advanced analytics to track completion rates, identify at-risk learners, and ensure audit readiness across teams.
Find more help on outlining your curriculum, download this guide.
4. Add employees and communicate expectations
With an LMS, you can effortlessly add employees to your training program and create a clear learning path for them to follow. Rather than manually enrolling employees in individual courses, an LMS allows users to progress through training at their own pace following a clear and logical path.
You can also create self-paced sequences that guide learners through required modules in a logical order, ensuring no critical steps are skipped.
But enrollment alone isn’t enough. For mandatory training to succeed, clear and consistent communication is essential.
Create a communications strategy to:
- Send automated welcome emails and deadline reminders
- Notify learners of recertification requirements or expiring certifications
- Personalize messages with AI to increase engagement and reduce drop-off
- Keep managers in the loop with real-time training status reports
Throughout this campaign, reinforce that completion is not optional—especially for time-sensitive or legally required training. Set clear expectations up front and repeat them as deadlines approach
5. Provide certifications to learners
Certification is another great way to boost employee engagement when it comes to mandatory training. Getting a certificate at the end of a training program provides a sense of accomplishment and achievement.
But certifications serve more of a purpose than just motivation. They’re critical tools for demonstrating to customers and external parties that your workforce is equipped with essential skills, and is compliant with all required industry standards and laws.
Modern LMS platforms issue completion certificates automatically when learners finish a course, helping HR and compliance teams maintain a verifiable record of who completed which training, and when.
But even more important is what happens next. Many types of mandatory training (like harassment prevention or data security) must be repeated annually or biannually to stay valid.
LMS platforms now allow you to:
- Automate recertification cycles, so employees are re-enrolled before their certification expires
- Track certification status and flag at-risk learners in analytics dashboards
- Maintain digital certificates and training logs for use during audits or external reviews
Tip: Use Thinkific’s Advanced Analytics to track certification completions to get a quick snapshot of what percentage of your organization has completed—or not completed—mandatory training modules.
6. Record and report training progress
The last and ongoing step in implementing mandatory training for employees is recording and reporting. Recording employee progress is essential for meeting regulatory requirements and maintaining internal accountability.
With a robust LMS, you can monitor training completion at every level—from individual employees to departments and entire business units. Advanced analytics dashboards let you:
- Visualize training progress and certification status across teams
- Track training expiration dates, recertification timelines, and overdue completions
- Segment data for HR, compliance officers, and executive leadership
- Maintain audit trails and version history for external regulators or internal audits
- Schedule automated reports to stakeholders with up-to-date completion data
You can also use data insights to improve future outcomes. For example, if analytics show repeated learner drop-off in a specific module, AI tools can recommend content revisions or trigger retraining for at-risk groups.
With all your courses, certifications, and progress monitoring in one place, an LMS makes mandatory training for employees simple.
Ready to implement mandatory training in your organization?
Compliance training doesn’t have to be complex or resource-draining. With the right LMS, you can automate recertification, personalize learning paths, and track completion across teams with confidence.
Thinkific Plus is built for organizations that need to scale mandatory training while staying audit-ready, risk-aware, and learner-focused. From AI-powered content generation to advanced compliance dashboards, you get the tools to build, deliver, and prove training outcomes. Don’t struggle with how to implement mandatory training for employees – with the right LMS to implement corporate training, the process can be straightforward.
Take a look at Thinkific Plus or book a call with our team to discuss our system in more detail.
This guide was published August 2021, and was updated in July 2023 to be even more useful!
