Continuing education, or CE, is a critical component for almost every employee. Once, it was really just limited to professionals who required ongoing training to maintain their professional license, but today that’s changed. Every employee, from fast food restaurant cashiers to LPNs, needs to engage in continuing training. Of course, this poses a problem for employers, even with an advanced LMS. One of the most crucial considerations here is tracking employee training.
Tracking Employee Training
By tracking employee training, you’re able to keep tabs on where each employee stands in terms of training, but you’re also able to increase retention in your ranks, stay in compliance with legal requirements, and more. But how do you track them accurately?
Keep Your Records Organized
When an employee is hired, you start a file on him or her. This can be your “home base” for tracking training completion. In addition to holding things like signed HR paperwork, resumes, disciplinary forms, insurance information and the like, their file should also include things like a log sheet showing the training sessions completed, certificates they’ve earned, and more. As a note, you might want to avoid using paper files – that’s completely possible with electronic records and a little work to digitize existing documentation.
LMS Recordkeeping
The right learning management system will go a long way here. With a modern LMS, you should not have to worry about manually recording modules or courses completed per employee. That information should be automatically stored when the employee completes each section. It should then provide you with access to this information. As a note, if your LMS only spits out spreadsheets and doesn’t give you access to an integrated dashboard with visualizations of employee training data, it’s more than outdated and should be upgraded or replaced.
Administer and Record Tests
If you’re more concerned with ensuring that employees are hitting the right milestones with their eLearning, you can track test scores. This can give you access to a wide range of information. Obviously, you’ll see how well they performed, which is an indication of how much information they’ve retained, but it can also help you determine their course in terms of topic mastery, as well as progress through the material on the LMS itself.
Check Your Record Keeping System
Your record keeping system needs to tie into your LMS. If it doesn’t, it might be time to look at upgrading your learning management system for something that will play well with others. Once your record system has been integrated, you should be able to use the search feature to locate information about a specific employee’s eLearning progress, test scores, and other training-specific information to make sure they’re on track. If your system does not have an integrated search feature, you’re living behind the times and it’s vital that you upgrade.
Automatic Notifications
One interesting feature of modern learning management systems is that many of them can be configured with automatic notifications that you can configure on your end to meet different needs. For instance, you can set up the system to alert you if an employee hasn’t made progress on his or her eLearning in a specific period of time. You can also set up notifications for pending licensing or certification expirations. This takes the burden off both your admin staff and your employees going through training by eliminating the need to manually track progress.
As you can see, there are plenty of different ways to tracking employee training to ensure continuing education happens and stays on course.