“Free” California Sexual Harassment Training is Actually Crazy Expensive

Free California sexual harassment prevention training is crazy expensive:  here’s why choosing a “free” training can cost your business big bucks.

Looking for free sexual harassment prevention training to meet California’s SB-1343 requirements?  That may not be a good idea, as it can hurt you and your business in the long run.

Here are several reasons you’ll wish you had chosen a low-cost paid provider of California sexual harassment prevention training, rather than searching for “free” training.

1.  They’re NOT COMPLIANT. 

     You would think that if an organization went to the effort of offering a California sexual harassment prevention training online, they would at least read the SB-1343 statute and the published definitions by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (CA DFEH) and the California Civil Rights Department (CA CRD) to check everything that the law required, wouldn’t you??  Sorry, please think again.

When you look at what they offer, the vast majority of online “free” trainings are NOT compliant with the statutory requirement that SB-1343 sexual harassment prevention solutions must be “effective interactive training and education“.

In its published FAQs, the State of California DFEH defines “effective interactive” online training as:

” E-learning that is individualized, interactive, computer-based training …”

“Individualized” means that a course identifies each student individually, such as by having them create a user profile and log in.  Once a student is identified, the course can offer them interactive features that have the potential to be different from the students on either side of them.  One example of individualization is the course that presents some of many multiple-choice questions drawn from a test bank. 

In contrast, training solutions that don’t distinguish between students can’t demonstrate that their approach is individualized.

Likewise, courses that present the same True/False questions in the same order to all students are NOT individualized.

Even the online training offered by the DFEH itself does not meet their published standard.  This is so astonishing that we simply must repeat it:

According to their own requirements, the free sexual harassment prevention training offered by the State of California is NOT compliant with their published training standard.

If we can’t rely on the state’s own free training, whose training CAN be trusted??

Here’s the best analogy we have for this situation:

Let’s say your friend comes to tell you about a new car insurance company with impossibly low rates.  Now, this car insurance company is a fake, and will never pay a claim.  However, the insurance card they print is probably good enough to pass muster with almost any police officer who could pull you over.

Would you buy car insurance from this company??  You’d be sure to save money…

Savvy business owners would surely NOT buy car insurance from a fake company, because they are buying car insurance for more than the single reason that the law requires it.  In addition to complying with the law, we buy required car insurance because we need it to be there for us in case of an accident.

     Now, the “accident” in the analogy above is a sexual harassment complaint or lawsuit. 

Should a complaint or suit be filed, your company will want to prove that you provided compliant training to all your employees.  You will want to be able to prove which employees took which training and when, which topics the training covered, which quizzes and tests the students passed by answering which questions, and that a qualified instructor was available and responded to students’ questions within the required two business days.

In this way the company demonstrates to the state agency or the court that the alleged perpetrator of any harassment had zero cause to think that unlawful behavior was somehow acceptable or would be tolerated.  This supports a robust defense. 

The SB-1343 law is written so that the full responsibility for providing and documenting the training falls on the employer, not the State.  With no “skin in the game,” providers of so-called ‘free’ sexual harassment prevention training have nothing at risk if they fail to comply with the law’s requirements.  But when a company’s reputation and bankroll is on the line, business owners want real help proving that they took all the right steps, not a “hit and hope” solution. 

2. You can’t track your employees through most free sexual harassment prevention training courses, which seem to be based on an ‘honor system’.

Consider that if even one employee has not completed their California sexual harassment prevention training by the deadline, the entire company is non-compliant. 

This makes visibility to where each worker is within their sexual harassment prevention training class very important.

But training platforms that don’t require students to log in can’t show you if your worker(s) even started the training or not.

Worse still, if a student in one of these ‘free’ courses needs to leave the class or a browser window closes, they have to restart the course from the beginning.  The California Supervisor’s course is two hours long.  As the employer pays for the training time, this is inefficient and expensive.  Compare the cost of training with each employee’s hourly wage, and paid training starts to look much more economical.

Finally, when a company pulls out the training file months later in the case of an audit or a legal proceeding, they want solid proof of compliance. At California Required Training Solutions, we give individually numbered certificates of completion that can be validated 24/7/365 using our certificate number lookup tool.  Being able to prove the name of the trainee and course as well as the date of course completion, tying back to a published detailed course curriculum and validated by a third party is high quality assurance at a low cost. 

In addition, the students we train can log back into their training portal at any time, so replacing a lost or misplaced certificate is no big deal.  The detailed logs we collect on every student can even provide lesson-level confirmation that a given worker affirmed specific concept(s) within the training by date and time.  This detailed data can be very useful if ever needed in a proceeding, and reassuring backup at a potentially stressful time.

3. Why would you trust a free sexual harassment prevention training provider with your employee list?

4. Non-‘free’ sexual harassment prevention training isn’t expensive as you might think.  

We make it easy.

California Required Training Solutions offers a fast, simple online training solution to California’s sexual harassment prevention training mandate. www.calreq.com features fully compliant online courses that are self-paced, timed, bookmarked, and can be taken from a host of mobile devices anywhere the internet is available. Course students can stop/start as many times as necessary without losing their place or progress, and retest until they pass. Upon finishing the course, students can immediately download and print/email a certificate of completion.

At California Required Training Solutions, we know the importance of getting your folks compliant with minimal disruption to the business. We offer full purchaser and student customer support by telephone, email, and platform private messaging seven days a week with response times averaging less than four hours. Choose California Required Training Solutions to get compliant with California’s sexual harassment prevention training requirements today.