Employee training and Employee tracking are a necessity in any organization. From the point of onboarding a new employee and throughout the stay of that employee in that organization, they would undergo various training. Organizations also invest in training their staff because of the anticipated positive results or perks. Perks like increased productivity, increased compliance, and better-skilled staff are particularly favoured among employers.
However, to ensure the training achieves its desired result, organizations would have to track their employees’ training. This article aims to show you the various ways you could track your employees’ training.
KPIs You Should Use For Training Tracking.
These are some essential metrics you should consider when tracking employee training.
- Course progress: This helps monitor how far your staff has gone with the training, if they have difficulties, and need help.
- Completion rates: You would want to ensure that the completion rates are 100% for mandatory training. While for other training, the completion rates would give you an idea of how relevant a particular course is to your employees.
- Pass/Fail rates: If most of your staff don’t do too well in an assessment, you would want to investigate if the problem is with the course, the instructional method, or the learners.
- Average test score: An average test score gives you a fair idea of the knowledge level of the generality of your staff. If it is low, that may signify that your team is not adequately knowledgeable, and you may have to do something about that.
- Training hours: This is another metric that is considered when tracking employee training. The number of hours spent by the average employee would help show which part of the training is more difficult to grasp. This would help with the subsequent training of new employees.
- Employee feedback: This is also an important metric. You can have a form with open-ended questions in which your employees can report their experiences, what they feel and what they have learned during the training.
These metrics would help you factually track the learning process of your staff.
How to Keep Track of Employee Training
Tracking employee training is not a new concept. Organizations have always had methods by which they kept track of the performance of their staff. However, some, if not most, of these methods were not effective. They produced inaccurate or skewed results. Some of these traditional methods are:
- Annual HR reviews
- Checklists
- Peer reviews
- Paper tests
- Psychometric tests
- Self-assessments – the most unreliable
These traditional methods are giving way to newer and more effective strategies. Below are the ways to effectively track employee performance in training.
1. Training Tracking Tools
Training tracking tools refer to those electronic tools and software used by organizations to keep track of employee training. These tools include:
A) Learning Management Systems(LMS)
These are all-purpose e-learning creation, testing, and tracking applications. LMS fulfils all your training, testing, and tracking needs in one package. However, not all LMS would be the right choice for your organization or business. The following are a few factors to consider when choosing an LMS;
i) Make sure everyone, the staff, HR, and every other person involved knows that you plan to use an LMS.
ii) Focus on what you need! Don’t be impressed by aesthetics.
iii) Find an LMS that meets those needs
iv) Choosing an LMS that you can grow with is fundamental.
v) Create a process to review the information your LMS generates.
B) Training Tracking Management Systems
These are dedicated training tracking software. They help gather data on employee training and present it in an easily understandable form.
C) Project Management Tools
Project management software like Asana that helps you manage tasks can also track employee training.
D) Spreadsheet Software
Spreadsheet software like Excel can manually input assessment scores, training progress, etc. so that every employee has a comprehensive record that can be used for tracking purposes.
E) Professional Help
You could also seek help from external sources such as human capital management companies.
Also Read – How Can Math Help In Future Career
2. Have a Training Tracking Process in Place
A well-laid-out tracking process helps standardize your tracking. Your tracking process should include completion dates, the facilitator’s evaluation, and time spent on the course.
You should also identify dates, those involved in the process, and the resources needed. Not also forgetting to spell out how to write the reports.
3. Assessments
Various forms of tests and assessments can be used to track training. For instance, you can use a post-course evaluation to gauge how much your staff learned from the training.
4. Take Course Reviews Seriously
Course reviews are the employees’ ratings or opinions about a course. If ratings are low, the system is not meeting the needs for which it was created.
5. Observe Employees on the Job
After the training is done, watch your employees to see if what they have learned reflects how they do their jobs. When an employee still makes the same mistake that the training should have corrected, it might indicate that that employee did not fully understand the training material and may need to retake it.
Conclusion
By now, you should have a good idea about how to go about tracking employee training in your organization.
We have looked at the KPIs or metrics that should guide your tracking. We also briefly looked at the traditional ways tracking has been carried out over the years. We established that those methods might not be the best.
We then introduced you to modern tracking methods, from various tools to creating a tracking process and taking employee feedback seriously.
Out of all of them, we recommend using an LMS, especially if you are using e-learning. It is a one-stop shop for all your training creation, assessment, and tracking needs.
The information in this article is an overview of how to keep track of employee training. You can find more detailed information on this topic on our website. Check out our blog section for more management tips, your organization/business would be better for it.
