Maintaining employee skills is vital for organizations in their drive toward profitable performance and effective risk management. Extremely competitive labor markets, remote and flexible working trends, and tight margins, are unavoidable realities in today’s business world. Failing to keep employees adequately trained, certified, and up to speed with relevant licenses is sure to have detrimental consequences.
These include punitive fines for non-compliance (IT, healthcare, construction, and manufacturing are particularly at risk here), loss of revenue or productivity, government sanctions, and potential lawsuits.
investigations often reveal that the incident was a direct result of inadequate training. In fact, inexperienced workers are involved in roughly half of all recorded workplace accidents, according to Golden Triangle Business Roundtable. In the end, it’s the employer’s responsibility to ensure their staff have sufficient training to perform their role confidently and safely.
Consumed by the day-to-day challenges of their operation, many organizations are struggling to stay on top of these responsibilities.
Today’s Antiquated Approach
Managing employee credentials such as licenses and certifications is a time-consuming process, often carried out manually or using old-fashioned methods. The job of keeping track of specific documents, expiration dates, and other details, as well as notifying employees and managers of upcoming expirations, is often managed clumsily or put off.
For example, using binders and Excel spreadsheets is totally impractical in the modern working environment, especially for organizations with large numbers of employees. It’s impossible to locate the precise information you need or to identify what’s outstanding.
While working from spreadsheets, it’s easy to make the mistake of updating information on one computer, but failing to maintain current, harmonized data on a shared drive or database. The result is often duplicate records, with no way of knowing which one is correct — increasing the risk of expired credentials.
The Self-Service Revolution
The most obvious solution is to use software to centralize your training records. Safety training tracking software, and similar systems, have been around for a while now. However, until Integrity Data arrived on the scene, it wasn’t possible to achieve this task (while maintaining and manipulating records) from within Microsoft Dynamics GP.
enables organizations to manage employee training records and credentials (such as licenses, certifications, training, and skills) with ease. Even better, employees and managers alike are equipped to see upcoming expirations, make updates, and upload updated documentation directly through the self-service portal.
One of the glaring problems with managing certifications, licenses, training, and incidents in a manual fashion — or while using disparate systems — is the difficulty in assessing how they fit together. Are your training sessions actually enhancing employee performance? Are they lowering the risk of injuries? Historically, it was difficult to answer those questions.
Dashboard reporting makes all the difference. Dashboards enable you to quickly analyze and pinpoint any training effectiveness trends associated with a specific organizational issue, perhaps a sticking point that was identified during an incident investigation. With these sorts of tools, it’s easier to build a more refined, customized training program to prevent accidents, meet obligations, and lower overall risk.
Ready to help your employees meet their potential and maximize the value they bring to the organization?
to learn how our can also help fill your need for safety training tracking software.