Electronic Training System
All companies need to establish what their employees need trained on, and maintain the records of that training. In ISO certified corporations this is especially important and is a target of audit for both your registrars and your customers. This poses a challenge for a company of any size that can be mitigated by using this system. To begin the system we start with 3 basic types of training:
- Each associate must read and acknowledge controlled documents and procedures
- Approved associates may certify others they have trained in specified tasks
- Associates may review training material on their own time and take an electronic quiz to prove their understanding of the material
Any of these three basic training types can be identified as required for all of your company’s employees, and / or by specific job titles. Once the required training is identified and setup in the system, it is capable of monitoring and e-mailing associates that require training or when a signed off document is updated to a new revision. This is done using 4 individual applications to setup, maintain, and use the system:
- An Administration Tool allows specific managers and administrators to edit the training items and identify which are required for your employees
- A Training Log tool allows each associate to sign off on documents, register on the job training for others they are approved to train, and print their complete training histories
- A Quiz application allows users to take a quiz, log their results, and print a certificate if they like
- A Mail Engine application is setup to perform the e-mail notifications to all associates when training is needed
Access to the applications is controlled by specific Windows logins (controlled by your IT managed Active Directory system). These applications utilize some basic business data to integrate your existing IT systems and document control. The current version is setup to use:
- Outlook Exchange Server Global Address listings to determine the employee list
- Agile Change Management exports to determine controlled document list and revisions
- A Sharepoint Services list would be equally simple to integrate as the controlled document list
- The e-mail system requires an active SMTP server to work
Setting up the system
The applications will need to be setup on your network to allow a secure area for data storage and an available network share for the applications the users will open. Once the applications are available, the management will need to determine the training item list and which items will be required for each associate and job title. Then, after some notifications to your staff, you’ll be able to schedule and activate the e-mailing system and you’ll begin collecting training records.
The current version of the system is built in Access 2003 and requires appropriate licensing from Microsoft to utilize.
Benefits
Using an electronic system for training records offers several important benefits to your organization:
- Immediate traceability to all associate’s training allowing visibility to who needs what training
- Automatic and unmanned notifications to associates that require training, keeping them up to date
- Central storage and retrieval of the training records for easy auditing and performance measurement
- Scalability to hundreds of associates
- Easy roll out of new training and documents to all your employees
Contact Graves Data Consulting to determine the applicability of this system to your organization and discuss time line and costs for implementation.