Computer-based training

A bedfellow to continuing professional development, computer based training is one of those curses of inhouse life that help senior management implement to satisfy themselves that their organisations are compliant with prevailing policy, their trading floors stocked with morally charged, uncompromised and preternaturally wise philanthropists who will stop at nothing to ensure progressive, liberal enlightenment pervades their commercial activities.

CBT comes in two varieties:

• Easy ones: Profoundly patronising, graphics-rich interactive modules where handsome cosmopolitan actors play out unfeasible hypothetical scenarios, and candidates are given a multi-choice question, the correct answer to which is either "escalate at once to legal and compliance" (if only one answer is permitted) or "all of the above" (where candidates are asked to assess a list of perfidies).
• Hard ones: Excessively dense, long-winded, detailed and arcane treatises, usually written by someone in compliance with the prose style of well, of an experienced compliance officer, where the resulting questions are verbose, ambiguous, predicated on incorrect assumptions, incapable of unequivocal answer and in any case do not match any of the alternatives offered by way of multi-choice answer. Passing this kind of test — a pass rate is usually 80% or more — requires a persistent sequence of guessing. If you are lucky, the training won't randomize questions for each sitting of the competence test, so you'll only need to do it three or four times.

See also

• Continuing professional development