Employee training has a great impact on employee motivation, retention and overall productivity levels, with 45% of employees likely to stay at their current organisation longer if there is visible investment in their learning and development. However, if organisations were to just administer training programmes without monitoring results, only half the work is done.
By tracking employee training, organisations can measure the effectiveness of its training programmes and ensure that employees are indeed learning what they are required to learn. A well-planned training programme can further enhance employee engagement, with 92% of employees indicating that employee training programmes have a positive effect on their engagement when well-planned.
There are multiple features that a comprehensive training tracking system should include in order to minimise the workload on HR while providing valuable insights to employees’ learning behaviour and progress. This may include analytics dashboards, training records management, assignment of training content, tracking of training completion progress and certifications.
Here are some key features to look out for in a training tracking system.
Flexible and customisable features
Every organisation has their own set of business processes, goals, and structure. These factors play a key role in influencing the type of training tracking system that organisations should look out for. Investing in a training system that allows for flexible and customisable features is a win-win for both HR and employees. Practically speaking, it allows HR to tailor the training programmes and administration to address individual employee learning needs while accommodating to the differing learning needs of each department and organisation’s overall learning objectives.
The option to customise the training tracking system also allows HR to easily modify and update training materials to align with ever-changing skills and competencies required for each role along with industry trends and business needs. A customisable training tracking system also allows for it to evolve alongside the organisation’s growth and expansion.
Ease of data integration
When investing in a training tracking system, it is worth bearing in mind how easy it will be to import existing data into the new system. This then questions the ease of data integration within the organisation. The new training system should be able to seamlessly interface with other key systems such as HR and Finance in order to facilitate the flow of key employee information.
In order to maximise the efficiency of the training tracking system, it should also have the capability to process big data and store huge amounts of data given the extensive number of key employee data available. By tracking and storing employee learning metrics, this can provide valuable insights on the organisation’s learning effectiveness as well as areas for improvement and enhancement on existing learning programmes.
Seamless user experience and interface
The key intentions of a training tracking system is to enable HR to easily track employees’ learning records while allowing employees to monitor their own learning progress and development. Hence, it is critical to ensure that the system is intuitive and friendly for all users. HR should be able to easily view and download employees’ records into the required report formats, update employees’ certification records and track outstanding learning courses that employees are due to complete. Likewise, employees themselves should be able to easily navigate the platform to view and complete any outstanding learning courses, receive due notifications if a particular certification or learning course is due for re-certification and plan their own learning and development path. Enabling a seamless user experience and interface helps to reinforce the culture of learning and development within the organisation, in turn, boosting employee engagement and productivity levels.
Enables report generation
Given that the training tracking system is likely to collect a huge database of important data, it makes sense that it has reporting functionality for HR to report on and study the data more closely. Data reporting is a vital aspect of decision-making and facilitates improvements to existing programmes and workflows. The right reporting tool should be integrated with other existing systems, which allows HR to easily put together data and run comparisons and analysis without having to export and import it into various systems to compile the report. This also means that reports can be compiled automatically with data being updated in real-time without the team having to do any manual data entry. Likewise, customisable reports are necessary to allow data reporting based on the organisation’ or HR’s requirements.
There are multiple factors to consider during the buying process. To help the organisation and HR narrow down their selection, it is best to note down the goals of implementing a training tracking system, the timeline as well as consider key features such as flexibility, ease of data integration, clear user interface and any other features deemed as “must-have” for the organisation. Purchasing a training tracking system may be a considerable investment for the organisation – it is best to always do in-depth research, read reviews or perhaps ask for a demo, before committing to one.