The New Standards for Compliance Training: Why Engagement Beats Length

This week’s Ethicsverse session, The New Standards for Compliance Training, brought host Nick Gallo of Ethico back together with Kirsten Liston and Patti Caswell of Rethink Compliance — a team Gallo repeatedly praised as some of the sharpest next-gen thinkers on how to make training actually change behavior. The conversation was anchored by a new Rethink white paper that distilled more than a quarter century of making compliance training, and eleven years of building a business around engaging learning, into a single question: if you want a great compliance training program today, what should you be thinking about?

The through-line of the hour was blunt. The standard for compliance training has moved, the audience and the technology have changed underneath us, and regulators now expect this stuff to actually work. Yet many programs are still running the old playbook — long, dense, PowerPoint-shaped modules rolled out year after year. What follows are the key takeaways from a wide-ranging, practical discussion about what modern, behavior-changing training really looks like.

Key Takeaways

The Standard Changed Because the Audience Did

Compliance training is always evolving, driven by three forces: leaps in technology, shifts in regulator attention, and evolution in the audience itself. Right now all three are moving at once.
Outside of work, most adults no longer seek out movies and hour-long TV shows — they consume TikTok, Instagram, reels, and short clips, while also happily sitting through four- and five-hour podcasts. Media has split into a “barbell” of very short and very deep, with the middle hollowed out.
The things that felt modern eleven years ago are not modern anymore. If the audience has changed and regulators want training to work, training has to follow the audience to formats that actually hold attention.

Engagement Is the Only Currency That Matters

The panel’s answer to a question about “too many short trainings” cutting through the noise: not everything needs to be under a minute. Short is a legitimate tool, but so are longer, expert-led, human formats — the point is not length, it’s engagement.
A 60-second reel does not earn attention simply by being short, and a two-hour podcast holds people only if it is genuinely engaging. Attention is the scarce currency, and engagement is what buys it.
If people click through training without engaging, organizations create a self-fulfilling prophecy about ineffectiveness. Genuinely catching attention — asking “what would grab the average human here?” — is the whole game.

Great Training Is a Layer Cake of Skills

Producing something good requires two distinct layers: first, deeply knowing the subject matter — export controls, sanctions, insider trading — and second, knowing how to present it creatively. Subject expertise alone is not enough.
Rethink’s Information Travels insider-trading video was cited as an example: rather than leading with the definition of material nonpublic information, it distilled the behavioral kernel — that knowledge travels with you from work into dinner, vacation, and group chats — and used unexpected, non-corporate visuals to pull viewers off their second screen.
A second example reframed conflicts of interest through the real McKinsey story of advising Purdue Pharma and the FDA simultaneously. It made a serious teaching point in a couple of minutes, not forty, by telling a true story people actually wanted to follow.
Gallo’s framing: a compliance officer is like a movie director. The same script becomes a very different film in different hands. Building a program that would genuinely engage you — the in-house expert who understands the company’s power dynamics and risks — raises the odds of real impact.

Authenticity Beats Polish

This generation has a finely attuned filter for authenticity. Real people talking candidly often outperforms highly polished production, which democratizes who can make effective media and in what formats.
The panel riffed on ideas like “drunk compliance” and a real client who did “compliance and puppets” — not because there is a playbook that prescribes them, but because they fit that company’s culture and got real engagement.
There is no single right answer. Some populations love avatar-led or animated content; others reject it. The job is to know your audience, try things, and watch for reactions and feedback so you can do more of what resonates.

The Telltale Signs of a Stale Program

Reusing the same training year after year and simply bolting on new topics — ethics, then trade controls, then anti-money-laundering, then sustainability — without ever stepping back to rethink it fresh.
Leaning on outdated approaches: text-on-a-slide decks with a narrator, dense legalese, and long paragraphs that look nothing like how people consume information anywhere else in their lives.
Assigning the same course to the same people repeatedly quietly erodes the program. Employees are used to a baseline of polish, and “same old, same old” signals that even the people sending the training are not that interested in it.
The antidote is “beginner’s eyes” — and sometimes literal ones. The panel described clients who ask a recent-graduate intern for candid reactions, because Gen Z will tell you exactly what they think.

Treating Adults Like Adults

Old-style end-of-course tests are fading. Many clients now skip them in favor of teaching questions embedded during the lesson — questions that check whether learners understand how a risk shows up for them, rather than adding easy filler minutes.
Rethink’s “test first” format gives learners two foundational questions per lesson: get both right and you get a short confirmation and reminders; miss one and you get the fuller lesson. It respects what adults already know and stops wasting the time of, say, world-class surgeons taking their tenth speaker-program training.
On the reality that repetition is still necessary: marketing’s “rule of seven” applies. Compliance is not top of mind for employees, so the message has to be delivered again and again — but it can be delivered respectfully every time.

Proving It Mattered: Data and Analytics

The DOJ’s evaluation of corporate compliance programs is not about length or robustness — it is about whether the training mattered. A short, creative, on-point message is, in many studies, more impactful than handing someone a forty-minute deep-dive they click through.
Meaningful analytics stay elusive because the quantitative data about qualitative questions — do people feel safe, do they think integrity is a priority, would they speak up — simply does not exist in most systems unless you deliberately go collect it.
The practical move is to embed a few questions in every course, accumulate a body of feedback over time, and then use LLMs to surface trends across years of qualitative comments. Even counting emojis in a Slack channel is an input. The goal is to make better, defensible bets with limited time.

Choosing a Partner, Not Just a Library

When evaluating a vendor, press hardest on three things: is the library big enough and kept up to date; is the content actually good; and is this a partner who will make your day-to-day job easier?
Look for depth over years within a topic — if you have to train on bribery every year, you need years of distinct bribery courses so you are never forced to re-run the same one.
A modern library should be 90–95% ready out of the box, with easy customization for the rest. Disproportionately expensive customization is a hallmark of legacy vendors. A good partner does curriculum planning with you, mapping a multi-year plan rather than leaving you to reinvent the wheel alone.
To make the internal case for a higher standard, show people what great looks like. A strong example does more to win buy-in than describing it on a slide — and when you roll out genuinely good content, the positive feedback itself becomes your evidence.

The Bottom Line

The new standard for compliance training is not longer or more exhaustive — it is more human, more engaging, and more honest about how people actually consume information in 2026. Deep subject expertise still matters, but it only lands when paired with creative, authentic presentation that earns attention and is backed by data showing it changed behavior. As Gallo put it, the ball in the net is behavior change — and the way to get there is to stop limiting ourselves to the old playbook.