So you’ve developed a privacy policy for your company. Now what?

The policy is useless if it sits on a shelf in someone’s office. Once it’s completed, you need to let everyone know about it. This includes providing training for employees, along with communicating to them and to customers.

How to share information about your privacy policy is the subject of Velsoft Training Materials’ August softskills courseware release: GDPR Readiness: Getting the Message Out.

The General Data Protection Regulation — a directive adopted by the European Union governing the use of personal data and its protection — came into effect on May 25 of this year. Although it’s a regulation for the EU, its scope includes any business that processes the personal data of citizens of the European Union, even if they do not physically operate in the EU. 

When the GDPR was introduced, we didn’t know if it would affect us here at Velsoft. We knew that it involved privacy policies for companies in the EU, and we knew that we have some customers who are located there.

To determine whether we needed to act, we conducted research on the GDPR and took an in-depth look at our procedures regarding data protection. This led to developing a new data privacy plan.

Weeks before the GDPR came into effect, a survey of IT professionals conducted by Capgemini revealed that 85 per cent of firms in Europe and the United States didn’t believe they’d be ready by the May 25 implementation date. The survey also found that one in four weren’t confident they’d be fully compliant by the end of 2018.

Taking this statistic into account and because we had gone through this process to develop our own document, we thought it would be helpful to others if we created a course that would assist them with becoming GDPR compliant.

Released in June, GDPR Readiness: Creating a Data Privacy Plan puts in place procedures and guidance for how to properly handle data, respond to information requests, and deal with unexpected incidents or breaches, along with how to develop a data privacy plan, which is one of the best ways for an organization to become privacy compliant.

Our hope is that the GDPR Readiness: Creating a Data Privacy Plan training begins the process for many small businesses. It’s important to note that the course is designed to kick-start compliance with the GDPR and other privacy legislation by creating a data privacy plan, but that this isn’t the only component necessary to become compliant.

GDPR Readiness: Getting the Message Out is a follow-up course to the first one. It deals with developing an internal training program and communicating privacy-related content to your team, how to add a privacy policy to your website, how to properly notify clients of policy changes, and more. Good communication is essential for upholding company transparency and is an important aspect of compliance with data privacy laws.

This training can also be used to share information with your team about any policy or procedure that your organization creates, such as those related to safety or the environment.

Arm yourself with the information you need to become privacy law compliant and how to convey information about your policy to team members and customers with GDPR Readiness: Creating a Data Privacy Plan and GDPR Readiness: Getting the Message Out.