How to Track Your Employees’ Training and Why It’s Important
Feb 28, 2024
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 Program
Before diving 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:
- Digital training solutions
- Employee responsibility in training
- Auto reminders for training
- Online learning platforms
Check out our FREE Training Guide to help you skill up your Team for Success.
Digital Training Solutions
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.
Employees Responsibility in Training
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 for Training
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 process
- Safety and compliance
- Employee certifications
- Know who needs training
- Increased motivation
- Accurate data
- Measure your ROI
- Deliver better programs
Onboarding Process
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 Training
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. It is critical for employers to be able to track employee training to ensure compliance with state regulations. For instance, all Illinois employers are required to provide sexual harassment training to their employees every year. Here are a few states with sexual harassment training requirements:
- California (50 or more employees; supervisors 2 hours once every 2 years)
- Connecticut (3 or more employees)
- Delaware (50 or more employees and supervisors)
- Illinois
- Maine (15 or more employees)
- New York City
Additionally, keeping an organized record of all the safety training that was completed by each employee will help limit your business’ liability. If you are in either of these states and need help providing sexual harrassment training to your employees, contact us today and we’ll gladly get you set up with our solution.
Sexual Harrassment Training
Employee Certifications Tracking
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.
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
- Leverage tracking software
- Utilize professional help
Use a Learning Management System
While there are many 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.
At HireLevel, we like to make sure training is consistent across the company and accessible anywhere at any time. How do we do it? By using the Learn & Grow learning management system, we can customize our own content and upload resources specific to that subject, and create courses. Our CEO puts training at the forefront and is an integral part of the HireLevel mission. It has been proven time and time again that continuous learning creates a well-rounded team for success regardless of the economic future.
We have been actively training our employees for over ten years. Back then, we were spending forty hours on group and one on one trainings. We thought to ourselves, is this efficient? As of 2020, we started utilizing a Learning Management System for all our training materials and was a game changer for both the trainee and the trainer. This tool has allowed more flexibility to our team, creating happier and more productive employees.
Our learning management system’s features and benefits helped our training program:
- Improve employee recruitment and retention with over 89,000 ready to complete courses
- Provide enhanced learning experiences
- Boost productivity and engagement
- Remain compliant with mandatory training requirements
Beyond that, Learn and Grow will help keep track of where each employee is in their training and enable businesses like yours to train employees to do their jobs more effectively.
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.
How to Get Started Using an LMS?
With an HR Solution like Learn and Grow you are empowered with the most efficient resources for tracking, while engaging employees in training. When you use our learning management system you can take your training to the next level and provide your employees with a convenient and engaging platform to build their skills and achieve their career goals.
