Training Managers – Are You Ready For An Audit Of Your Employee Training Records?

Quick Quiz!1. What percentage of the personnel in your company are up to date on the training required for their job?2. Do you have a list of all personnel with training that is overdue or will expire soon?3. Can you provide a current list of training requirements, completed training, and the current training status for all of the employees in your company?4. Can you provide a list of who is currently trained to perform a specific job?These are just a few of the questions you may be asked by an auditor to assess your businesses’ compliance with a growing number of regulatory requirements. Increasingly, auditors expect an answer or report from an employee training records database to produce these answers quickly and accurately.While the quality and completion of the training is of great importance, it’s just as important to have a defined process and a system to provide tracking and reporting of your employee training records. In fact, lost or missing training records can put your company at risk or require a lot of wasted effort and loss of productivity if retraining is required to get your records in order. On the other hand, a good system will improve the efficiency of your operations and provide the metrics you need to track and continually improve your training process going forward.Many small companies start out with a “training file” for each of their employees. As the company grows and the number of personnel and training requirements grow, it can become a nightmare to answer some of the questions we started off with in this article. This can lead to the development of unwieldy spreadsheets designed to try to keep track of the growing number of requirements and completed training. A spreadsheet can work well for determining who is trained on a specific course, but it begins to break down as soon as you need to cross-reference dynamic training requirements with personnel transcripts. For example, Course ‘X’ may have an annual re-training requirement, while Course ‘Y’ may require re-training whenever the underlying procedure changes. And, Course ‘Z’ may be required only once as a new hire. Answering any of the questions above when your data is stored in a spreadsheet is going to take massive amounts of time to prepare for all except the smallest of companies.Fortunately, there are a number of systems available which incorporate a relational database to pull all of the information together for you to produce quick and accurate reports. Training Manager from Kaizen Software Solutions is one example. This software has adopted the familiar Microsoft Office look and feel and is very easy to use while providing powerful reporting capabilities.If your company already has a system in place, perhaps now is the time for an internal audit. Ask yourself or your training staff the questions in the quiz at the top of the article. If the answers come quickly, Congratulations! You’re ready to begin using that data to dig deeper and continue improving your training processes and results.


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