Training Management

How to track employee training with software

High quality employee training tracking software goes beyond just tracking completion. Discover what employee training software can do for you.

December 29, 2020

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If you're going to keep employees satisfied with their jobs, as well as help them produce the best work for you, then employee training is critical. Not only do they continue to grow their strengths, but you show them that you value their work and their professional development.

That's how and why employee training helps with retention and productivity. According to the LinkedIn Learning 2019 Workplace Learning Report, 94% of employees say they would stay at a company longer if it invested in their learning and development. 

And when you consider that over 63% of companies say it's harder to retain employees than it is to hire them, you realize that this can be an expensive problem. It's especially hard when 40% of people who get poor training leave their job within the first year.

But it's not enough to just offer professional training and development, you need to keep track of their training for any number of reasons. Ultimately, there are three reasons why you should track employee training.

  1. There may be compliance requirements for federal, state, and industry regulations and accreditation. Violations of these regulations could be tracked back and attributed to a lack of proper training, which means your organization is liable.
  2. You can quickly and easily identify the knowledge gaps in your organization. This helps you see where there are certain problems with understanding your policies or if there are institutional gaps in knowledge.
  3. You can determine whether employees need additional training or upskilling for areas that will help them do their jobs better.

You can't do all of this by flipping through a binder filled with training logs and reports – it's hard to keep track of an entire organization on paper, to identify patterns, or to trust that everything is complete and up to date.

This is where employee training software can help you manage your training and development program. It helps ensure you're offering fresh, up-to-date training content rather than just dealing with the administrative tasks that don't accomplish your organization's goals.

In this article, we'll show you how to track your employees' training efforts and expectations, and how employee training tracking software can save you hours and hours of time.

Employee training your organization needs

There are several common areas of employee training that organizations often require, which means they track it very closely.

Onboarding

As your organization hires new employees, training and orientation often take several hours, if not a few days, and often before the new hires start their work. Other organizations just say "here," hand their new employees a thick binder, expect them to read it, and call that training. There are many steps involved in bringing new employees up to speed, so it's important to know they reviewed and understood it all. With employee training tracking software, you can see how they're progressing, which areas and policies they've completed, and which ones they have yet to address. By automating the training and progression, you know the material is being delivered consistently for every employee.

Professional Certifications

If there are licensing requirements for your industry or for certain jobs, there's a chance your accrediting agencies need to know who's got the latest certificates. Employee training software lets you not only give your employees the necessary training to keep up with the licensing requirements, you can see at a glance who's current and who's not. You can even share this information with any accreditation agencies, sharing data in seconds that would otherwise take hours to analyze.

Continuing Education

Some professional organizations require their members to take continuing education courses in order to maintain their membership or licensing – CPAs, attorneys, nurses, engineers, doctors, pharmacists, and teachers, to name a few. Tracking the CEU hours and their expiration on an employee training software solution can help you and your employees avoid problems with licensing and education.

Compliance Training

Many organizations have regulatory and legal compliance requirements they have to meet, whether it's hazardous material handling, HIPAA, or other safety and privacy laws. You should regularly offer training on things like sexual harassment, diversity, security awareness, and discrimination. Not only can you track these training efforts, you can provide records to show that you've met your requirements.

Career Development

As we said previously, professional training and development shows your employees that you value them, which keeps them around longer. Additional skills training, such as how to operate a piece of machinery or how to improve public speaking, help your employees do their jobs better. The better they are, the better the work they do, and that only helps your company succeed.

You can manage all of these requirements with online employee training. With the right software, you can source, create, and deliver content to your employees, no matter where they are in the world. They can do their training at work, at home, on their phones and tablets, or even when they're traveling. 

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Employee training tracking software

Most employee training tracking software offers the bare minimum. It delivers training content and tracks basic progress and information.

And that's a good start, but tracking is just one piece of a total training solution.

Good employee training software does more than just track the progress and completion. You need something that does everything from start to finish – hosting your content, onboarding new employees, testing their knowledge and comprehension, getting feedback, and of course, tracking as many different pieces of data as it can manage.

Here is a list of what a complete training management software should help you accomplish.

Onboarding

Every employee should have the same foundation of organizational knowledge, such as vacation and sick days, sexual harassment, cyber security, and so on. Since employee onboarding is repetitive, you need to make sure you can show that everyone has the same knowledge. This is when you should harness the power of online training management software.

Create all the necessary courses and modules, and plug the employees into them from day one, so they can get used to the online training system.

Online and offline training

Most traditional Learning Management Systems (LMS’) track training that's completed on their software, but they're not able to track offline/in-person training. Your training management software should be able to track online training as well as schedule in-person  classroom training and track their completed results.

Test results

How do you know if training is completed and that everyone understood it? Testing and assessments. You could keep track of the results in a notebook or a spreadsheet, but that gets cumbersome and manually intensive.

Good training management software will actually let you create tests, deliver them to the trainees, track completion, and tabulate the results. You can analyze the aggregate results and see if people are having problems with a particular policy or procedure.

Employee feedback

Wouldn't it be valuable to know how engaged your employees are in their training, how satisfied they are with their jobs and their career directions? You can use surveys as a part of your training management to allow for two-way communication. Employees can share feedback in ways that are healthy and appropriate, and trainers and content developers get important feedback to help them improve as well.

You can also solicit feedback on employee rewards and recognition, what size shirts they wear, or even where everyone wants to go for team outings.

Automate manual processes

One of the benefits of employee training management software is that you can automate a lot of the repetitive tasks, which can save you a lot of time, resources, and money. You can do things like aggregate test results, send completion notices to employees' supervisors and/or training staff, and remind employees that they need to complete their training modules. 

In large organizations, you don't want to worry about losing important information, do manual follow-ups with 300 employees to see if they've all completed their training, or send them scrambling when their certifications is about to expire.

PowerDMS can manage it all

You need an employee training software that can handle all of these functions: employee onboarding, online and offline training, testing and feedback, and automation. PowerDMS makes all of this possible for you.

You can track all your efforts from an employee's first day through to their master certification or advanced training licenses. With our employee training software, we're able to create a living connection between your employee training, your policies, and your accreditation management. 

To learn more about how PowerDMS can help you with your employee training efforts, request a free demo of our training management system.

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