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 21+ years of experience designing enterprise-scale compliance, sales, and technology training programs. Before founding Xcelus, he held senior roles at Hitachi Vantara, where he managed the global sales enablement portfolio and co-created the Hitachi Sales Academy boot camp for onboarding international sales teams; at SmartForce, one of the earliest pioneers of enterprise eLearning, where he oversaw global channel training programs across EMEA, APAC, and LATAM; and at EFS, where he led a 17-person training division.

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.

Scale and Experience

21+ years building compliance and ethics training
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 happen because employees fail to recognize a compliance risk in the middle of a normal 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 Compliance Reinforcement Cycle™ 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 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