Gone are the days that monitoring and tracking employee training is a nice to have. Maintaining this information plays a big part in both having visibility into the competency of your employees and in mitigating the corporate risk that can devastate a company if it’s not in place.
And organizations use this information in multiple ways. If you have had any exposure to the ISO set of standards, you’ll know that pretty much every standard outlined by ISO (be it 14001, 9001, 26000, 50001 etc.) includes training as an essential component. So if you want to be certified or just conform to the standard, you better make sure that your training tracking house is in order.
But it doesn’t stop at ISO standards, look at the regulatory bodies around occupational health and safety, specifically OSHA in the US and WSIB and other agencies in Canada and around the world; not adhering to training requirements with relation to workplace safety can result in significant injury, possible fatalities and significant fines and loss of reputation.
If you aren’t sure where to start or maybe you just want to streamline your existing processes, this top 10 list can help ensure you are have a firm handle on tracking training in your organization:
- Plan for it at the outset. Locking employees into their required training courses as part of their induction process is essential in making sure that training is ingrained within your organization.
- Incorporate it into your processes. Ensure when you are promoting individuals or moving them within your organization that their new contract comes with a section that details the required training for their new role .
- Reward it. Offer incentives for employees who score well on their training or complete it before their required time frame. Have a {insert role} leader board that highlights top performers. Even consider allowing those employees a role i n training others.
- Test for it. Don’t assume that because you’ve trained someone that they’ve actually learned. You have to test and track competency to ensure that it has all sunk in.
- Track it. As your workforce grows or people come and go it can be difficult work to keep track of who has taken which course, how they have scored and what gaps exist in training. A spreadsheet can get unruly quickly and is prone to error while a training tracking software system like Intelex works perfectly for this purpose (*bonus – it also allows you to schedule all of your employee training – see point #1).
- Repeat it. Your long-term employees can easily forget the training that they went through years ago; designing and scheduling refresher courses for these individuals can help keep their skills up to date and ensure they are passing on correct processes and procedures to newer employees.
- Set it and forget it. Having a system in place that ensures an employee in a particular role has a series of training courses assigned to them and if they don’t take the training required, their boss is notified, then their boss’s boss, helps to make sure that things don’t slip through the cracks.
- Consolidate it. If you don’t already, consider having one person hold overall accountability for the training program. You’ll likely need departmental champions to manage the specific training needs for their functions but having one person that works with those champions to ensure you’re following these 10 steps can be a big help.
- Communicate it. This might seem pretty straight forward but if employees don’t understand exactly what they are responsible for and why it is important with regards to training, the likelihood that they’ll take it seriously will be diminished.
- Make visibility easy. If you have to look in multiple places or consulting multiple people to get a full picture of how your training program is running, you are making it too difficult and opening up the opportunity for error.
More than likely you already have several of these points in place, particularly if you are in one of the industries that are prone to workplace accidents and injuries. But if you need help streamlining your training, our Training Management software system can help manage at least 8 of these 10 steps. To learn more visit our Training Management product page or request a demonstration of the solution.
