Four Reasons to Automate Your Employee Training Process

It makes sense to integrate training management into the system where employee data are stored

Published: Monday, July 28, 2014 - 12:17

This is the fourth installment in our six-part series on how automating common business processes with a quality management system (QMS) can benefit your organization. Here we’ll focus on the training management process and why automating it with a QMS results in effective employees—and makes compliance easier for you.

Businesses today are constantly evolving, constantly changing—this is a must in order to succeed. Policies change, procedures change, processes change, and the need for training typically follows. Keeping employees up to date and helping them adapt to change is the key to maintaining a well-informed workforce. This applies regardless of the industry you’re in, which is why an effective training process is needed.

Here are four reasons to use your QMS to automate the training management process:

1. Gain greater visibility into employee data: To enhance the visibility of employee data, it makes sense to integrate the training management system with the system where most of your employee information is stored. Including employee profiles in the training management system ensures all employee information is current and will prevent the risk of duplicate data entry— meaning less work for you. This also allows you to group employees by department, function, or facility, which leads to better management of all employee data, particularly in organizations with a staff of thousands.

2. Tie training requirements to training plans and employees: Being able to define training requirements and tie them to training plans, document records, and employees allows you to organize training by type, e.g., quality or safety-based training, general human resources, and so on. Based on this information, you can create requirements groups and training events centered on each type. This ensures that the individual groups are receiving the right type of training. The benefit is that you are creating a more organized system of linking training to records, and to employees and groups. This lessens the time needed to deploy training—just adding a training requirement to any of these elements automatically builds the training records.

3. Leverage any built-in, automated testing: An effective training system will have a method to record test scores. This allows you to see, through testing, whether your employees have been properly trained. Testing programs linked to your training management system provide assurance that the employee has received the training and passed the exam. The QMS’s training management process will also integrate testing into the training plans with pass/fail or percentage scores to fully assess an employee’s abilities.

4. Integration of training plans with other quality processes: The automated QMS not only simplifies the training process, it can also integrate with other quality processes to improve visibility across processes, enhance communication and result in true collaboration for your organization. Some other processes that can integrate with your training system include:
• Corrective action: When an adverse event occurs, linking investigations to the training record will allow you to determine if retraining is required. It will also allow you to make sure that prior training occurred.  Linking training to corrective action helps to uncover systemic training issues.
• Reporting: Having a strong reporting system will give you increased visibility into training and provide visibility into the data to analyze trends and key performance indicators (KPIs). This improves overall operations and helps to mitigate risk. Linking training management to reporting also pinpoints poor training through reports on training effectiveness.
• Change management: Adverse events will often result in a corrective action, which may lead to the need for changed or reworked processes. This might be a change in the design or process, which will create a need for training. If your training process integrates with change management, you will be able to foster continuous improvement in operational areas and employee development.
• Document control: Controlled documents are typically the central repository where job descriptions, processes, and work instructions are stored. When new documents are released or existing documents revised, employees might need additional training. Integrating training with the document control system helps to easily define who needs training on a particular document.

People are the foundation of any successful business operation, and the overall success of your business correlates with your employees’ knowledge. To make sure your employees are fully knowledgeable, a training management process is needed. The QMS’s automated training management system will ensure that all employees are effectively trained and continuously tested on that training, resulting in a workforce that is fully knowledgeable and up to date on their responsibilities.

Brenda Percy is the product marketing analyst at VERSE Solutions, a Quality Digest content partner.

About The Author

Brenda Percy

Brenda Percy is the product marketing analyst at VERSE Solutions, based in Farmingdale, New York. She is responsible for communicating overall technology trends and compliance initiatives to the market, and has an extensive background in quality and compliance technologies.