How To Track Training With Cloud-Based Training Management Software
Does your company complete a lot of training in a certain time period? If you’re running lots of training courses, which can be different depending on the department or location staff members are located in, it can be quite hard for you to keep track of everything. You’ll need to know who completed what training when, which training they still need to complete, what new training people need to complete when the time comes, and even when people need to resit training to keep their qualification valid. Phew!
Rather than relying on filing systems and huge spreadsheets, where information can easily be entered incorrectly, not updated, or forgotten about, have you thought about using cloud-based training management software to manage your internal training?
A training management system can help you if you offer training commercially, but did you also know it can really help streamline your internal staff training, and make the whole process, and therefore your business, run a lot smoother?
Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can track training with cloud-based training management software.
1. Create Personalized Training Plans For Staff
Even within one company, there can be lots of different training that needs completed, and not everyone in the company will be completing the same training.
This can depend on a couple of different factors:
- Job role.
Depending on what people do in their day-to-day role will depend on the type of training they need to complete. Customer-facing roles may need additional customer based training, whereas staff members who work in hazardous areas may need first aid training to be able to do their job effectively. - Job level.
For example, managers are going to require different levels of training to other team members, as every job level will need to expand different skill sets. - Office location.
Depending on where your team are located, they may have to complete training which is specific to their location. This could be things like training on specific laws which only apply in the country they are located in or the countries they will be working with.
There will also be more general training sessions, which chances are everyone in the company will actually need to complete, such as fire safety and how to use any internal systems which you use as a business.
So how are you supposed to keep track of exactly what training every person in your company is meant to complete, when they need to do it, and what order it needs to be completed in?
If you use a training management system you can create personalized learning plans or learning tracks for all your staff members. You can create these depending on the level, role and location of each staff member, so that each one is completely personalized for each person in your company, and everyone is only completing the training they need to.
This also makes the on-boarding process a lot easier for you as well, as once you have a templated learning plan for a particular staff member, if you are hiring someone to fill the same job role, you will already have a copy of all the training they need to complete ready for you.
This also makes it really easy for you to make any changes you need to do anyone’s learning plan, as you can make the changes from within your training management system, and the change will automatically display for your staff members, so they are always working from the most up-to-date version.
Using a central information point like a training management system for all your training plans means you don’t have to worry about sending hundreds of training plans individually to staff members, and they don’t need to worry about keeping them safe or forgetting about them. All the information will be displayed where it’s easy to find in a few clicks, and both you and your staff members can easily keep track of everything.
2. Reminder For Training That’s Expiring
As we mentioned above, your staff members may need to complete training which needs to be done again and again to make sure it stays valid. Specialized training like this can be vital to the running of your business, as perhaps your team need to be accredited by a specific awarding body at all times for them to be able to come into work every day.
This means it is vital that this training is always kept up-to-date and retraining dates are not skipped or forgotten about entirely.
A training management system can make this whole process so much easier, and can do all the hard work for you, so you never have to worry about forgetting important dates again.
Once a staff members has completed the training once, you can mark that training as completed, but you can set up an automated communications reminder for a few weeks before their training is due to run out, which you can also set yourself. You can set the reminder to email your training administration team and the staff member themselves, so everyone is aware that the training needs completed. By setting the reminder for before the training runs out, you are making sure you’re giving everyone involved enough time to schedule and complete the training required, without their current qualification lapsing.
3. Track Completed Training
The most important thing a training management system can do for you is to actually let you see all the completed training for all your staff members in just a few clicks. You can do this in a few different ways, so you can pick the method which works best for you:
- View each class you have scheduled to see who completed it.
- View a list of all the assessment results you have for particular training sessions to see who passed and has a valid qualification. This will also make it easy to pinpoint any staff members which may need to take part in reassessment.
- If you use a Learning Management System (LMS) as part of your training management system, you can see reports on how far each of your staff members are through all the learning they are currently taking part in. This is good for just checking on the progress of your staff as well, as you can see when people are perhaps stuck or not engaging with the eLearning as you would like them to.
- Use your training management system reporting feature to pull specific reports. This can let you see all the training everyone has completed ever, or break it down by time period (what training was completed in the last year), by team (what training did all the members of the Marketing department complete), or whatever specific parameters you need to report on.
This means you can see all the training which has been completed, and also see where training has been missed by certain staff members, so your training administration team can be alerted to who they need to schedule training for.
It also means you can find out in seconds who in your company is trained in a specific element. This can be handy for doing things like identifying all the first aiders in your business, or checking who still needs to complete an external training session which only runs a few times a year, as perhaps not everyone who needed to got the chance to attend last time the session was run.