About Xcelus: Scenario-Based Compliance Training Experts

Why Scenarios — A Personal Story from Founder Todd Corbett

“I failed college algebra three times. The fourth time, a teacher stopped explaining the equation and gave me a situation I recognized from real life instead. A few scenarios later, I understood algebra well enough to eventually earn an accounting degree. That experience is the reason Xcelus exists.”

That’s not a metaphor. It happened. And it’s the most honest explanation of why Xcelus builds training the way it does.

Scenario-based learning works because of how human recognition actually functions. Abstract rules are hard to recall under pressure. Situations you’ve practiced — even in a training environment — leave a cognitive trace that activates when a similar situation appears in real life. That recognition is the difference between knowing a compliance policy and actually applying it when a vendor offers an unusual gift or a manager makes a questionable request.

Todd Corbett founded Xcelus in 2005 with that principle at the center of every course we build.

Todd Corbett, MBA — Founder and Principal

Todd is a global learning and development leader with nearly three decades in the training industry and more than twenty years designing enterprise-scale compliance, sales, and technology training programs. He entered the field in 1997 as a program manager for Novell Authorized Education Centers (NAEC), then moved to CBT Systems and SmartForce — one of the earliest pioneers of enterprise eLearning — where he oversaw global channel training programs across EMEA, APAC, and LATAM before the company’s acquisition by Skillsoft. In 2003, he began building training rather than managing it, leading a seventeen-person training division at a multimedia studio, where he produced sales training videos for Hitachi. Through Xcelus, he went on to manage Hitachi’s global sales enablement portfolio and co-create the Hitachi Sales Academy boot camp for onboarding international sales teams. He holds an MBA from Brigham Young University and a BS in Accounting from Utah State University.

Awards and Recognition

Gold Stevie Award — Code of Conduct Training Video
Gold Stevie Award — Corporate Training Project
Silver Stevie Award — Corporate Training Project
Bronze Stevie Award — Continuous Improvement Training Video
Silver Telly Award — Code of Conduct Training Video
Supplier of the Year — Life Technologies (now Thermo Fisher Scientific)

What Xcelus Does

Xcelus develops scenario-based compliance training for enterprise organizations. Each course places employees inside a realistic workplace situation — a vendor offering an unusual gift, a manager asking a questionable favor, a conversation edging toward inside information — and asks them to make a decision.

That decision-making practice builds the risk recognition skills that policy reading alone cannot develop. Employees who have practiced recognizing a compliance risk in a training scenario are better equipped to recognize it when it appears in real life.

Learn more about how this works on our How Compliance Training Works methodology page.

What We Build

Xcelus organizes its work around a single idea — that compliance depends on recognition, the ability to spot a risk in the moment it appears. That idea is delivered through four offerings and shaped by two frameworks that sit beneath them.

Scenario-Based Compliance Training. The foundation described above is delivered as a course library spanning conflicts of interest, gifts and entertainment, insider trading, data privacy, harassment, fraud, and more. Explore the scenario library.

Continuous Compliance Training. Annual training alone fades. Short, scenario-based reminders deployed across the year keep recognition current, so an employee who trained in January still recognizes the same risk in November. Learn more about continuous compliance training.

The Xcelus Decision Brief™. A short, self-contained decision exercise a team runs together — one realistic situation, a set of choices, and a discussion that surfaces how people actually decide. The Employee Edition runs for fifteen minutes and is led by the team’s own manager, with no trainer in the room. The Leadership Edition puts a management team under the same pressure one altitude up, where the failure is usually that nobody owns the decision. See what a Decision Brief actually discovers.

The Xcelus Decision Lab™. A ninety-minute facilitated exercise that puts a senior team inside a high-stakes governance decision — a live crisis with competing pressures and no clean answer — to reveal how the organization actually decides before a real event forces the question. Explore the Xcelus Decision Lab™.

The two frameworks beneath the work

The Decision Readiness Engine™. The methodology beneath everything above — the framework Xcelus uses to map the decision moment, the pressure that makes the wrong call feel reasonable, and the recognition an employee needs before they face the situation for real. It is why every Xcelus scenario is built around a choice rather than a rule. Read about Decision-Ready Employees™ and the Decision Readiness Engine™.

The Compliance Reinforcement Cycle™. Not a product but a pattern, and one that applies specifically to courses — the year-round rhythm a compliance curriculum is built against, in which recognition is established in a course, refreshed at short intervals, and met again before it fades. It is why Xcelus course programs are structured as a sequence rather than a one-time completion.

Scale and Experience

Building compliance and ethics training since 2005
400,000+ employees trained annually
25+ countries — multilingual delivery with a 70% translation cost reduction through an internal workflow
Named clients include: Hitachi / Hitachi Vantara, AXA XL, Ionis Pharmaceuticals, NuVasive, Yanfeng, Patterson-UTI, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, TuneProtect, Eurowag, Crinetics, and others

Our Approach

Most compliance programs do a good job explaining company policies during annual training. The challenge is that most compliance incidents don’t happen because employees don’t know the rules. They occur when employees fail to recognize a compliance risk in the midst of a routine business situation.

Xcelus builds training that addresses that recognition gap — placing employees inside the situations they actually face and asking them to practice making the right call before they encounter it in real life.

We also believe annual training alone is insufficient. Our continuous compliance training deploys short scenario-based reminders throughout the year, keeping compliance expectations top of mind between annual training events. Employees who completed a course in January should still recognize the same risk in November.

What these sessions surface

Three sessions, three different topics, and the same ending every time.

Twenty-one years of designing this work have produced one finding more consistently than any other, and it is not the one organizations expect. People generally know the rule. What they cannot do is name the path. Three published sessions, run with real teams and captured as they happened:

Conflicts of interest

Everyone knew conflicts mattered. Two of the five chose disclosure.

Nobody in the room was avoiding the rule. They held different theories of what disclosure is for — and none of them could locate the disclosure process. Read the session →

Responsible AI use

Five people walked in sure they understood the policy. Two chose the approved tool.

The wrong answer that drew the most votes was the careful one — sanitize the transcript first. And nobody in the room could say where the approved-tools list lived. Read the session →

Ready for Monday

They knew which tools were approved. Not one of them could verify which account they were signed into.

One of the five chose to pause. Three saw everything relevant and still chose to proceed. Read the session →

Three different failures, and in all three, the discussion ended in the same place: nobody could find the guidance. That is a gap an organization controls directly — which is why it is worth finding before an incident does it for you.

What Clients Say

“If this is the standard we can expect from all of the training modules, this will clearly be an example of best-in-class training.”

— Compliance Officer, Pharmaceutical Company

“We have had a great deal of positive feedback from the training. Requests for more training like this are quite unusual for our department.”

— Corporate Communications Officer, Financial Services Company

“Everything went very smoothly, and we are very pleased with working with Xcelus. Thank you for making our annual Code of Conduct update so easy.”

— Compliance Manager, Insurance Company

Start a Conversation

If you are evaluating your compliance training approach or planning a new program, we are happy to talk through what scenario-based training could look like for your organization.

Contact Xcelus