If you’ve ever had a part in the management and administration of a training program in an organization, you know exactly how much work and effort goes into keeping track of training data. You become one part HR team, one part knowledge experts, and a whole lot of babysitting.

Training data is important – it’s necessary for compliance. It’s also vital to the success of an organization. Well trained employees are safer, know what’s expected of them, and keep an organization working smoothly and efficiently. It’s a vital part of every company – but especially for manufacturers.

So why is the management of training so cumbersome and time-consuming? Gosh. We could go on for hours over a whole pot of coffee on the pitfalls of training programs in organizations. However, we’ve compiled the four most common things we’ve seen through the years with organization training programs.

Common Pitfalls of Tracking Training

Older records are all over the place

“Hey, do you know where Tom’s training records from last year are? The auditor wants to see them.”

Chances are you've had a similar conversation before and do you know where those records are? They could be in a filing cabinet somewhere. They could be stored digitally in 17 different folders depending on who uploaded them at the time. Some of them may have walked off over time, or they never were recorded as completed in the first place, even if the training was administered.

When you’re in a crunch for training records, finding the specific ones you need from the past can feel like an epic game of Where’s Waldo on expert level.

He said, she said - AKA the honor system.

No one person can keep track of who’s successfully trained on what in a facility of 200+ people. It’s impossible unless you have one of those brains that just remembers everything. (If that’s the case, congratulations to you, please send help to the rest of us.) Without a system of record that’s fully comprehensive of everything everyone’s ever trained on, it’s hard to truly know.

You get into this situation of Joe saying he did that training and having no record of it. Do you make him retake this training he swears he has done already? Or do you trust that he did it? How do you record that? And if an incident occurs, how do you prove it?

You’re not a library.

Being in charge of the training for your facility means people think you automatically know everything about everything. You’re the one who gives the training, don’t you know how to start the Prima EVO? Why not?

While yes, you may have little bits and pieces your brain has retained over the years of training people, that doesn’t mean you’re a knowledge expert or that they should be asking you. Training is important for this specific reason: employees need to know their job, and if they can’t remember, they need to be able to see that information quickly and easily – and not rely on the word of someone else.

Retraining timelines are complicated.

Lots of training needs to occur on a recurring basis. Maybe it’s a yearly safety refresher course. Maybe it’s a Forklift certification that happens every three years, and when they need a re-certification depends on when they took it the first time.

How are you, as a training manager, supposed to keep track of everyone’s calendar differences and keep this in mind? Lots and LOTS of hours reviewing spreadsheets, calendars, and old documents is how. And that’s cumbersome. It takes away your time from other things – like improving the training content, or training new employees. It’s busy work that no one likes.

Bottom Line: Tracking Training is Complicated.

But it doesn’t have to be. There are so many Learning Management Systems (LMS) out there that can alleviate some, if not all of the issues you face. Noviqu was built to provide a quick, easy access platform that provides the kind of transparency a training system needs, and hopefully give you as a manager more time to do the things you actually want to and need to do. Not search through documents from last year in Sharepoint.