It is just as important as being able to deliver staff compliancy training in a variety of formats. For example, via face to face, online courses and distribution of electronic resources. However, today you need to be able to offer superior training pathways for your staff. This is to keep them on target to continue developing their professional skills.
To achieve this, training and competencies for your staff members can be tracked using an automated yet flexible process. Attempting to create these training pathways for a small to medium size business is just as difficult. And even more so for larger corporations. In addition, such corporations often have higher budgets and require more personnel to be set up with appropriate training. This training is ideally then tracked to provide a more thorough understanding of the individual or/and group progress. As a result, provides their workforce with more qualified staff by way of up to date and relevant training.
Setting up superior training pathways requires many components to enable the employer to structure ongoing purposeful and superior training pathways. To achieve this, you need the following 10 elements:
1. TURNKEY SOLUTION
The success of any project is reliant upon the processes and systems that are put in place. As well as the ability to have them delivered in a consistent and ongoing fashion. You will inevitably end up with cracks appearing in your pathway when trying to juggle multiple platforms and associated processes to offer the one solution. You need a single platform that can take care of all the processes, one that doesn’t require ongoing technical and IT support to make changes.
2. CLOUD HOSTING
Focus should be on creating, monitoring and delivering consistent and evolving training pathways. Not trying to juggle and manage all the different departmental requirements with incomplete solutions. All too often we hear of HR departments having disjointed facilities and processes in place that just don’t work. Years can go by without appropriate training on offer. A cloud based solution allows the organisation to concentrate on their brief and not be distracted by ‘old technology’ problems which inevitably slow you down. Cloud hosting will always end up cheaper and more reliable, plus most importantly gain superior outcomes.
3. COMPETENCY MAPPING
Training pathways should always start mapping each staff member’s competencies. The mapping facility automates a complex and often overwhelming process that can fail if controlled by multiple training facilitators. Your organisation needs a platform that allows you flexibility to create your own competencies. And will automate the process to ensure each individual is up to date. Put simply, excel and word docs are not the answer anymore and will only delay the process by manual data entry.
4. PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
In addition to standard compliance training, it’s vital that organisations have specific professional development training available to its workforce. This has many benefits; it keeps staff up to date in their chosen field, allows them to expand their professional skills into different areas and maintains a pathway for personal and professional growth within your organisation. This helps keep your staff happy as it gives them growth potential and it also gives you more scope to fill vacant positions from within the organisation.
5. LIBRARY MANAGEMENT
An important component of a successful training matrix and the successful offering of professional development is the ability to manage a library of courses and skill-based training. Your platform should at least be able to offer library integration for access by individuals, groups and the organisations workforce as a whole. Library management helps you focus personnel on the professional development most suitable for them, allowing you to design a superior training pathway.
6. INSTANT UPDATING
One of the greatest downfalls of a successful training system is the inability to be able to do instant updating without the need to involve other stakeholders. Legislation and workforce compliancy is an ever-evolving proposition, so it’s crucial you’re able to issue relevant changes easily, including updates, additions and removals, all within a single platform. You shouldn’t be reliant on other stakeholders as this eventually leads to an out of date matrix and offering, and therefore a system that only offers superficial solutions.
7. AUTOMATED COMMUNICATIONS
To achieve superior outcomes, you need to streamline the communication process by automation. Now, training competencies and other training material, resources and events are set up. The system then needs to take over the role of communication to ensure that best practices and high levels of consistency are locked in place. This is done to stop important processes to fall through the cracks.
8. CUSTOMISABLE REPORTING
There is usually a requirement for training facilitators to address their team on their training progress and competencies. To help make this effective, each administrator/facilitator of the training platform needs to be able to create relevant customisable reporting. For instance, team leaders could have reports that lists any staff member that is not compliant with allocated training. The system also needs to offer instant emailing functionality via the customised reporting function to allow instant and effective communication.
9. CUSTOMISABLE THEMEING
This is an important psychological factor that ensures that the staff member understands who the training is coming from. As well as that it is an essential part of their work responsibilities. Loading and delivering training through a process and look that is always identifiable by staff as being prepared and delivered by their employer will bring a feeling of consistency to the minds of staff members. This will help engage them and promote their desire to complete relevant training materials as required.
10. RESPONSIVE DESIGN FOR ALL DEVICES
In today’s work environments, we tend to no longer buy bulk hardware across the entire workforce. Instead, you can incorporate multiple versions of computers, laptops, tablets and phones into business. Overall, this means we need the training to be deliverable across all devices via the one platform. Having a system that has a responsive user interface delivered using the latest HTML5 standards means all personnel can now access their training no matter what devices they have at their disposal. Not having this flexibility to deliver training in this way could mean large parts of your workforce fall behind in the corporations training pathways.
Adding all six above elements together will ensure that you are capable of delivering superior training pathways to your workforce, whereas missing any of these elements could lead to the failure of the process required to achieve these outcomes on an ongoing basis. While an organisation can have many administrators to help run the systems, the process should not be reliant on any one of them to continue to deliver consistency in the delivery of training pathways.
Therefore, the biggest danger is installing multiple systems and processes, whether they be in-house or through outside vendors. The answer is to use a single all-inclusive system to deliver your training pathways.
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