Best Practices for Managing Employee Training and Safety Records
Employee training and development is an important part of every business. As a company grows it is important to ensure the process used to manage the training requirements for each employee, expiry dates, certificates, training results, etc., continues to get more efficient to handle the increasing complexity. Meticulous, well organized training records are even more important in industries like Construction, Oil & Gas, Transportation, and Mining where potentially lifesaving safety training is needed before an employee can even set foot on a job site.
Here are couple of the current best practices for employee training record management on a small, medium, and large scale.
Digitize
With computers being a ubiquitous part of our working lives, and the mainstream use of backed up remote cloud-based servers, the reasons to keep paper training records is fast evaporating. Terabytes of employee information that, if in paper form, would have filled countless filing cabinets are now being store on thumb to fist sized hard drives that can be accessed from anywhere in the world with an internet connection.
Looking up a specific record or employee now takes seconds rather than requiring a trip to the file room at your head office where you needed to sort through the alphabetically organized files that could easily be misplaced or left in the incorrect order.
Almost every form, with ever increasing functionality requirements, can be replicated using digital form software. You can create complex hazard assessments, competency validation forms, COR audits, the list is almost endless. And when a small and inevitable change is required to one of the forms you can simply make the change to your company’s online template rather than having to reprint thousands of new forms and shred the old ones that had been printed but not yet used.
Taking your forms, folders, files, and records online is one of the best ways to create more efficiencies in your training and record management.
Automate
When a company has 1-25 employees it can be a reasonably straightforward process to maintain a list of training records in a spreadsheet with the expiries as well as links to certificate pdfs. However, as a company grows and the number of employees gets up to 50, 100, 1000, or 10,000+, the process of manually organizing training in a spreadsheet becomes a herculean task.
The best way to avoid letting training record management overwhelm your safety or HR professionals is by investing in a system that allows a high level of automation using tools like a learning management system, training record management system, training matrix, and digital safety forms in a way that they work together and communicate seamlessly.
With the training matrix software systems in place today you can quickly add each role at your company to the matrix and identify all the training requirements needed for that role, from the Accountants all the way to the Welders. When this training matrix is integrated with a learning management system every time you hire a new employee and add them to the system with a role, they will automatically receive the list of online training courses and materials they will need to complete. It will also allow for expiry notifications and reports so every supervisor can stay on top of the training requirements for their team.
While training and training records will continue to be required in every company, and for every job, the way we provide the training and manage the records is changing quickly, and now is a great time to start aligning your business with some of the best practices that will help you stay competitive.
