Article highlights
- Importance of tracking employee training
- TMS vs. LMS: which is right for your organization?
- How to track employee training with software
It's not always possible to hire the perfect employee who ticks off all the boxes and has all the required knowledge for their job. You have to train and nurture them, help them develop into the position, or even provide training so they can move up within the organization.
Other employees require training and professional development to keep their professional licenses, which are required to legally do their job or help you meet the accreditation requirements for your organization.
And still, other employees want training included as part of their professional development because it gives them job satisfaction and increases the likelihood that they'll stay with the company.
All this can be handled with in-person training sessions and instructors handing out training materials, or it can be managed for a fraction of the cost with online cloud-based employee training solutions that let people watch, read, or listen to training content on their favorite device at a time that's convenient to them.
In this article, we're going to discuss the importance of tracking employee training, the difference between training management systems and learning management systems, how to track employee training, and the different options that are available to hospitals and healthcare facilities, police departments, fire departments, EMS responders, and corporations.
Importance of tracking employee training
Enough people have quit their jobs in 2021 that economists are calling this trend The Great Resignation. Service workers and professionals are quitting their jobs in droves – jobs they're unhappy with or jobs that don't invest in them via fair salaries and professional development.
As we learn why so many people are quitting (we know that part of it is because they've received poor employee training), it's important that companies continue to attract and retain great talent. According to a 2016 Gallup Workplace poll, 59% of Millennial workers say opportunities to learn and grow are important to them. That is, they may not accept a job offer if they don't get any professional development or training.
So there are benefits of tracking employee training:
- Improved safety and compliance: Training employees also means helping them be safer. You can upload the latest safety training to your employee training software, update veteran employees, and teach new employees. Showing that employees have completed their training can help you reduce your liability insurance and meet any regulatory requirements. It can also help reduce patient injuries and mortalities in healthcare facilities and reduce the chance for injury and illness for police, firefighters, and EMS responders.
- Track certifications, licensure, and continuing education: Help employees track their certification and licensing requirements, as well as amass all that information for your accreditation requirements. You can even track offline/instructor-led training, such as continuing education units (CEUs) earned at conferences. If you ever have to show training results to accrediting agencies, you can do that in minutes, not days.
- Better manage performance reviews and promotions: Train leaders from within your organization by giving them training programs with measurable results to see who's working to improve their skills. Track departmental training goals and use that data for individual performance reviews and promotions. Rather than relying on memory over the last annual review and only paying attention for the last few months, you can look at the entire year in review.
You can learn more about tracking employee training on our website.
TMS vs. LMS: which is right for your organization?
As online learning continues to grow and evolve, you're likely to hear about learning management systems and training management systems, and wonder if they're different or interchangeable.
They're actually not the same thing but are two sides of the same coin. A training management system (TMS) is more suited for trainers, a learning management system (LMS) is better suited for students.
A training management system is a software application that helps you administer, deliver, track, and report educational and training content. But unlike an LMS, it's more focused on back-office processes, like booking instructors, reporting the business data, and aggregating the various results. It's ideal for the training manager who has to manage all the different programs and sessions for their organization.
A learning management system is more focused on administering, delivering, and reporting your educational content, but it can even provide more robust testing and gamification. It's student-focused and has more features that encourage participants to continue with their learning but doesn't have the same kind of back-office functions that a training management system does.
Examples of learning management systems
There are a few learning management systems available, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.
- TalentLMS is a cloud-based management system that lets you import and create your own content. It has 54 of its own courses including data protection, GDPR, staying motivated, organizing and motivating a team, and even marketing essentials.
- SAP Litmos has its own content creation tools to create different learning modules. It offers customized learning paths and users can create their own courses and units of instruction. Get a more detailed review of SAP Litmos here.
- Moodle is an open-source LMS, which means there's a global community of developers who are developing and upgrading the product. And because it's global, someone may have already created the interface and instructions in your users' native language.
You can find examples of more LMSes on our website.
Examples of training management systems
- Apty helps companies adopt new software and understand how to use it while avoiding delays and hangups in implementation. The company provides video-based walkthroughs of the new software that benefit existing employees as well as onboard new ones.
- Kitaboo Insight seeks to deliver mobile-first, cloud-based training, delivering multiple formats including videos, slide decks, PDFs, and ebooks. You can track and analyze how employees use the app, see which content users access, and when and where to create or improve content.
- TalentCards trains employees with small chunks of content called "cards," which can be accessed whenever employees need a refresher or want to learn a piece of information. Employees can spend as little as five minutes learning new procedures, and reinforcing them by reviewing the cards each day until the knowledge is locked in.
You can read about more TMSes on our website. You can also learn more about choosing a TMS or LMS for your organization there.
How to track employee training with software
It's not enough to provide employee training solutions, you also need to track their efforts. Here are a few reasons why:
- There may be accreditation or federal, state, and local compliance requirements.
- If there's ever a lawsuit for an employee's actions, your organization could be held liable if those actions could be attributed to a lack of training.
- You can sync your policies to your training and test people to ensure they understand the policies. If there are knowledge gaps, those represent potential problems. You can tailor your training and even the policy to close the gaps.
- You can see if employees need additional training or upskilling to help them do their jobs better. Check out their current training scores and look for areas of improvement.
The easiest way to track all these training efforts and improvements is with a cloud-based employee training solution. It helps you save time over flipping through binders filled with training logs, sign-in sheets, and training reports.
You can learn more about the benefits of tracking employee training with software on our website.
How to develop and administer an online training course
When developing your online training course, determine your audience and your training goals. Maybe you need to train nurses on new medication labeling procedures, train factory workers on safety protocols, or teach new employees about your company's sexual harassment policy.
Next, plan your training formats, which will undoubtedly include cloud-based content, including videos, audio recordings, slide decks, and PDFs. You may also want to include an interactive element with each slide as a way to increase engagement.
Break large topics into smaller ones, like chapters and sections in a textbook. "Chunking" this training material makes it easier for people to learn. If someone can only spend 15 minutes at a time watching training videos, they can check off more units quickly. Otherwise they may feel discouraged by spending a few hours on a single unit.
You'll also want to assess participants' knowledge by giving them tests to ensure they've paid attention and retained what you taught them.
You should host your training content in a cloud-based software-as-a-service system to give your employees access to it all. If you keep everything paper-based, you'll have a lot of costs printing and disseminating everything. Plus there are chances people will be operating from outdated materials, or won't have a place to store it.
By hosting it in the cloud, your employees can watch, read, and listen to the content on their mobile phones, tablets, laptops, or desktop computers. They can use Windows or Apple, iPhone or Android, iPad or Galaxy. It's even possible to access it with a Kindle Fire tablet and a wifi connection.
With an online employee training solution, you can assign different training modules to the entire organization, a particular department, or even a group of individuals. You can monitor their progress as they move through the units, or set alerts if employees are falling behind and in danger of not meeting their milestones.
You can also connect training materials to other company information. For example, if an accrediting organization such as The Joint Commission healthcare accrediting agency comes out with new best practices for patient safety, you can link your new policies to your training so participants can see specific applications of those rules.
You can track all the progress through the training management system. Measure individuals' completion rates, test scores, completion time, and module progress. Look for patterns, like whether people are missing the same questions. This can tell you whether that part of the material needs to be improved or updated.
Finally, you can track all staff certificates and licenses in the training management system. This tells you which employees' licenses are coming up for renewal and how much training they will need to complete.
You can learn more about developing and administering an online training course on our website.
Final thoughts
Since it's harder to find new employees, keeping the ones you have is even more important. One way of doing that is engaging them through training and professional development. Rather than sinking a lot of money into hiring trainers and dealing with the headaches of trying to schedule employees and work around their schedules, you can help them manage their own professional development with an employee training solution like PowerDMS.
Everything is cloud-based and you can upload your own content, provide assessments, and track employee completion and test scores. You can also sync your training to your company policies and procedures, and even aggregate the data for accreditation and licensing.
PowerDMS gives you many of the training features we've discussed here, as well as state-of-the-art policy management software. It's a one-stop solution for your training, policies, and accreditation.
If you would like to learn how PowerDMS meets your training and policy management needs, please request a free demo today.
