August 2024
We've enhanced the Training 360 platform by adding fields for learning outcomes, development needs, and reflective statements within the offline activities template. This update makes it easier to capture and manage Continuing Professional Development (CPD) requirements, ensuring a more comprehensive and organised approach to professional growth.
Additionally, the new EMS Waiting List feature allows users to add themselves to a waiting list for fully booked event sessions. If a spot becomes available, users on the list will be notified, enabling them to secure a session promptly.
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July 2024
We're excited to introduce our new Reporting Management Dashboard on the compliance portal, designed with a visual and intuitive interface to enhance your ability to manage compliance effectively. This tool allows you to access, analyse, and extract management information more efficiently, whether you're tracking key metrics, generating detailed reports, or exploring data in depth.
Additionally, we've introduced a Personal Data Breach Register within the Compliance Registers product. This feature includes comprehensive questions to capture all necessary details about data breaches, with a defined approval workflow to ensure thorough review and approval by the appropriate parties.
To further streamline your processes, we've added batch approval capabilities in registers, allowing you to approve multiple submissions at once, saving time and reducing complexity.
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June 2024
This month, we've worked on a few enhancements to better support your team's workflow and compliance efforts. The new approval types for offline activities offer flexible options, including line manager, team, or open approval processes, allowing you to tailor approvals to suit your team's specific needs.
Additionally, we've integrated eLearning with Policy Hub, ensuring that users must attest to relevant policies before moving forward in their training. This integration reinforces compliance and accountability.
To further promote continuous learning, the new "Question of the Day" (QOTD) feature enables users to review missed questions and revisit related eLearning modules, helping to maintain a culture of ongoing education and strict adherence to company policies.
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May 2024
We've introduced several enhancements to streamline your workflow and improve efficiency. The policy search feature now includes a sub-category field, allowing you to quickly locate specific policies with greater precision. Additionally, deeplinks have been added for compliance registers, enabling direct access and saving you valuable time by bypassing unnecessary steps.
For compliance register submissions, approvers can now assign submissions to the most relevant parties, ensuring a more efficient and targeted evaluation process.
Lastly, the new EMS notification feature automatically informs a user's line manager if an event is cancelled close to its scheduled date (for example, a day before), enhancing communication, planning, and cost management.
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April 2024
This month, we've rolled out Material Design on the majority of our customers' compliance portals to give a fresh, consistent look and stronger branding. You will see this reflected in the appearance of buttons, tables and tabs on your compliance portal.
The Policy Hub has had a few enhancements this month, the most notable of which is a feature that tracks the time users spend reading the policy before they attest. It adds another USP to our Policy Hub alongside the ability to switch certain sensitive policies to anonymous mode - which gives your employees the peace of mind that they're not being monitored if they look at those policies.
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March 2024
We're excited to introduce a brand new feature on the Skillcast Portal called Question of the Day - QOTD. This feature automatically sends out a daily question to all your colleagues. The question bank, the frequency, the day of the week and the user group can all be set by you.
The questions are randomised so that not everyone gets the same question daily. It's a fun way of engaging your colleagues with compliance. It helps knowledge retention and application in realistic scenarios. It gives everyone their personal competency map and gives you the organisational competency map.
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February 2024
This month, we've launched Skillcast Basic, our self-service portal for small companies, which comes preloaded with courses for most major industry sectors. Although it doesn't offer all the features of our complete Standard or Premium portals, its affordability and ease of use make it an attractive solution for small teams who need a reliable and comprehensive solution.
Skillcast Compliance Portal comes pre-translated into all major languages, and our clients can further customise the portal text in each of these languages. So, we're delighted that our portal Search now covers these translations so that you can search for items in any language featured on your portal.
A significant update to the Policy Hub - you can now author and edit policies directly on the portal instead of uploading documents.
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January 2024
This month, we took a big step towards switching on embedded compliance for our clients. You can embed direct links to assignments and controls in your business processes and communications. Your colleagues can launch these activities directly from these links instead of going to the compliance portal to find them. A Gartner study found that embedded controls cut staff compliance breaches by 58%.
So, you can now provide a link on your intranet to launch your online gifts and hospitality register. Or, provide a link to a 2-minute microlearning module on creating strong passwords when you remind employees to reset their passwords.
It's also been a big month for Compliance Registers. We released an updated Compliance Breach Register and two new compliance registers to digitally maintain your Accident and Near-miss books, as required under RIDDOR.
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December 2023
We've enhanced how you administer Training 360 - the Skillcast Portal feature that enables you to record off-LMS training, e.g. in-person courses, workshops, seminars, coaching sessions, etc. You can now turn any such activity you've created into a template that you can use to create similar activities in the future. We also offer a more powerful reporting and analysis interface. Speak to your account manager if you wish to see this in action.
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November 2023
We've recently released several enhancements to the Policy Hub. A few that stand out include the functionality to require your users to sign policies digitally and to upload supporting documents to a policy that are only visible to policy owners.
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October 2023
We launched our Cybersecurity Awareness Benchmarking Survey (CABS) to mark the cybersecurity awareness month. Over 25 corporate clients of Skillcast participated in this initiative to create a global benchmark index for staff cybersecurity awareness. Contact your account manager if you would like to survey your staff and measure your organisation against this global benchmark.
Also, this month, we released off-the-shelf surveys for employee wellbeing, diversity and inclusivity. One aspect of your compliance portal critical for conducting these surveys is anonymity. If you want your employees to give honest feedback about themselves or the workplace around them, you have to ensure that they are kept anonymous.
The survey feature on the Skillcast Portal does that perfectly while still chasing up colleagues who haven't completed the survey and preventing multiple responses.
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September 2023
This month, we've released integrations for Slack, HiBob and Bamboo to enable clients to integrate their compliance portal with their HR processes and communication.
We've added WebP to the list of file formats that you can use within courses to create a better user experience with smaller, richer images.
We've also improved the accessibility of our e-learning modules and other user interfaces by collaborating with Tetralogical.
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August 2023
We are pleased to announce a new option for single sign-on (SSO) using Microsoft Azure AD, the most common user directory used by our clients. It allows your administrators to directly control who can/can't use your compliance portal and to report on who has accessed it and when. And it has no certificate expiry, so you don't have to renew the SAML-SSO certificate yearly. The Azure AD SSO also opens the way for delivering Skillcast services from within your business apps, such as Microsoft Teams.
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July 2023
Many clients subscribe to our off-the-shelf course libraries but deliver these courses via third-party Learning Management Systems (LMS). By default, this uses SCORM training, whereby the LMS passes us the user's identification. However, to reduce personal data processing in line with GDPR recommendations, we have introduced the ability to anonymise the user data we receive, thus keeping their users' personal information, such as name, email, and ID, confidential.
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June 2023
This month, we're excited about a new feature we've developed for our clients, such as Dr Martens. We call it Diagnostic Assessment/Assignment. It works as a gamified assessment that uses banks of questions to test your employees on various compliance issues/topics that are important for your company.
Then, depending on how employees perform in each topic area, they are automatically assigned the appropriate training - microlearning, standard e-learning, or even face-to-face training. It works even if the training is not ready yet - the system maintains the records and assigns the training when it becomes available. This could be a good way for you to automate your compliance training needs analysis (TNA) and assignments.
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May 2023
We've added the option of sending daily/weekly digest emails for approvers summarising all the compliance register submissions awaiting their approvals. Similarly, all users can get digest emails with all their submissions that have been approved, rejected or sent back for further information.
One of our clients' top favourites about Skillcast is the ability to customise e-learning courses before rolling them out to their users. But this requires creating a copy of the course on your portal, and when you do that, the course is delinked from the master version and no longer updates with the master version. We now offer the ability to share the master versions on your portal, which is ideal for Compliance Bites and other courses that don't need customisation.
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February 2023
We're excited about the release of a new functionality for e-learning modules called FastTrack. With this turned on, a learner can do a pre-assessment at the start of the course. If they fail, they must complete the full course, including the post-course assessment. But if they pass, they only need to complete a short refresher rather than the full course.
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January 2023
The Policy Hub feature on your compliance portal is a place to hold all your staff policies and seek attestation from your employees. By default, the portal tracks all the activity. So, you can see who has attested to the policies and who has looked at a policy but has not attested to it.
However, this can make employees uncomfortable looking up certain HR policies. Many clients have asked us to let their staff look up such sensitive policies incognito. So, we're delighted that you now have the option to switch on this anonymous/incognito model on any policy on your Policy Hub.
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