How to Track Your Employee Training Program and Why It’s Important

There is no doubt your human resources department has a surplus of things to accomplish. If you’re not doing so already, one of those things should involve tracking your employee training program. While most of the HR recruitment efforts focus on finding the right employees for your company, it should go beyond that to ensure each new hire is properly onboarded and receives training. The best way to do this is to implement a tracking system.

Improving Your Employee Training System

Before delving into why you should track your employee training program, you may want to consider how you can improve your training system altogether. Here are a few things to consider.

Go Digital

Most other things in your business are probably digitized by now, so why not do the same for your training programs? Having training information scattered through different folders and drives will hurt your process in the long run. It can also make you seem unorganized to incoming employees and hurt your current staff when their training needs to be updated. So, having a centralized digital space for all of your training records, if you don’t already have one, will keep things running smoothly.

Give Employees Responsibility

You should strive to give your employees a sense of ownership and responsibility when it comes to completing their training. Your management team or human resources department should not be solely responsible for employee training. Allow your employees to access their own training records and even log some of their own hours. Doing this will also allow them to keep track of their own goals, certification requirements, and job expectations.

Set Up Auto Reminders

Automatic reminders are a lifesaver when it comes to employee training. It not only helps you stay on top of what is going on but it pings your employees when things are due too. This helps ensure the entire process stays on track and doesn’t drag on for an extended period of time. Additionally, if your employees need to complete training or certification by a certain deadline so their license doesn’t expire, this keeps everyone aware of the upcoming tasks and expectations.

Integrate With Online Learning Platforms

As mentioned above, whatever way you can go digital, do it. Shift your training program to an online platform if it makes sense for your company. This will allow you to update training on a regular basis. It will also let you see who has completed certain courses, viewed training videos, and read through course modules. On top of that, you will be able to view who has completed assessments and see scores. Not to mention, having it all on one platform will keep things easier for your staff.

Why Tracking Employee Training is Important

Training is key when it comes to the success of your business. Even if you have great training programs in place, they do little-to-no good if you aren’t tracking the progress. Your management team needs to know what training materials your employees have completed and how many hours they need to be considered fully trained. To keep this organized, a good tracking system is a must. Here are a few reasons why.

Onboarding

Most of your training will occur during onboarding. When you implement a good tracking system, it ensures that you are setting your new hire up for success. You can create a standard onboarding checklist to track when each new employee has completed certain steps, making sure they receive all the vital information they need. This will help reduce turnover and also increase morale among your staff because they will have the tools they need to do their best.

Safety and Compliance

Another reason you should track employee training is to maintain safety and compliance. Employees who are trained well minimize risks on the job, making your company a safe place to work. Additionally, keeping an organized record of all the safety training that was completed by each employee will help limit your business’ liability in the event an accident does occur.

Certifications

Within many fields, certification is needed to do certain types of work. Maintaining up-to-date certifications will help your workers stay on top of safety changes, new technology, and updated skills in the industry. It also makes sure that each of your employees is in compliance. Your HR department will need to provide workforce management that ensures each member of the team has received the proper education and certification. So, having a good system for tracking who has certifications and for what, as well as when the certifications need to be renewed is valuable information to have.

Know Who Needs Training

One of the more obvious perks of having a tracking system in place is that you’ll be able to stay on top of who needs training and when. For instance, if you have regular training sessions that employees need to complete at certain times during their employment, your tracking system will let you know when that is coming up. With new hires, it will let you know where they stand with their onboarding training materials and where they might need additional help. This sets up your entire staff for success and keeps you on top of where each employee stands.

Increased Motivation

Believe it or not, training can help improve motivation in the workplace. When employees feel like they are learning and improving their skill set, they are more motivated on the job. So, maintaining regular training is key to keeping morale up on the job. A good tracking system will keep you and your employees in the loop as to what their current training status is. It will also let them look forward to the next steps in their training or career.

Accurate Data

When it comes time to perform employee reviews or give out promotions, a tracking system is a must! It allows your managers to set internal goals for your employees as far as growth and development goes. They can take a look at the tracking software and know exactly where an employee stands in terms of moving forward with their personal goals and within the company.

Measure Your ROI

There is no doubt that your business invests a lot of time and money into training your employees. Tracking their training and how it impacts your processes will help you determine what the return on investment is. Knowing this will also assist you in determining what parts of your training program are most helpful and which can probably be done without.

Deliver Better Programs

Speaking of your employee’s career goals, having a good tracking system for your training will also help you deliver better programs for your team in terms of growth. You can identify which training materials are ineffective and what you could use more of. Given this information, you can re-design your training to improve the overall learning experience for your staff.

What Are the Most Important Metrics to Track?

Of course, you will want to track training completion, but there are other metrics you’ll want to stay on top of as well. For instance, each employee learns at their own pace. So, being able to track progress in addition to completion is a good thing to do. If someone is taking longer to finish a course than others, they may need additional support. Similarly, if many employees struggle during a training course, there may be a bug in the system or it may be too difficult.

Beyond progress and completion, you will also want to keep track of assessment scores. This will help you monitor your employees’ skills and improvement. If certain employees don’t meet your standards, they may need to be retrained. This can also be tracked with a good system.

Lastly, you can use employee training trackers to get a feel for the overall learning experience you are providing. When your training materials are more engaging, your employees are more likely to be happy in the workplace. Best of all, they are more likely to succeed in their jobs.

How to Track Your Employee Training Program

Now that you know why tracking your training program is important, you can begin to take the steps to implement your own system. How do you go about tracking training and what is the best system to use? It all depends on your company and its needs. Here are a few ways you might consider training employee training.

Use a Learning Management System

While there are a number of tools out there to track employee training, a learning management system (LMS) is one of the most popular. This program helps deliver eLearning materials to your employees automatically. So, whether they are a new hire or an employee that needs to brush up on their skills, they will receive the training materials on time. Beyond that, it will keep track of where each employee is in their training for you.

Training Management System

Similar to LMS, a training management system (TMS), can help you track your employee training with ease. This system is designed to track training that is instructor-led rather than training that is performed on a computer. A TMS can help you track much of the information mentioned above as well as managing session plans and resources, budget, and creating reports.

Leverage Tracking Software

As mentioned above, one of the reasons you should be tracking training in the first place is to gain metrics to help gauge whether training is effective or not. Leverage tracking software will monitor how long it takes employees to complete certain things. It will also gather data about how effective training is for each employee. This is most useful if your training takes place in a classroom setting and not online. If you are tracking eLearning materials, an LMS will still be the best option.

Project Management Tools

You can also use project management software, like Asana, to track where your employees are in their training. Using tools like this you can assign employees certain training materials and get updates on where they are in the process. You will also get an update when the task is completed. Best of all, using a management system like this, you will be able to go back into the record and see who has completed what and when.

Track It On Excel

One of the more basic ways to track your employee training program is by creating your own excel spreadsheet. While this may seem a bit outdated, it is still a good way to track training, especially if you are monitoring a lower number of employees. The spreadsheet will include information like a list of required courses, scores, and employee details. Each time one of your workers takes a training course, update the spreadsheet to reflect it.

Utilize Professional Help

With a Human Capital Management partner, like HireLevel, you are empowered with the most efficient resources for tracking, while engaging employees in training. When you use professional recruiting services, the staffing agency generally takes care of onboarding and initial orientation for Day 1 readiness.

Whether you need assistance with tracking your employee training, human resources, or payroll services, the professionals at HireLevel are here to help. Compare solutions to learn more about what we can do for you.

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