Spotting issues in your training department, which may turn into more significant problems further down the line, can be quite challenging, especially if you’ve been involved in the business for a while and have been doing things the same way for a long time. It can difficult to take a step back and spot those problems which could quickly become a drain on your time, resources, and money!
As a training management platform provider, we think it’s essential to make sure our customers are saving a lot of time and money, as well as getting the most from their resources, to ensure they are offering the best training possible. With that in mind, we have our list of the top five things you need to stop doing right now to ensure your training department runs as smoothly as possible!
1. Stop Repeating Yourself
Repetitive tasks and duplicate data entry probably eat up a lot more of your precious time than you actually realize. Just keeping all your course information up to date can lead to doing the same things over and over, and will see you entering mostly the same data every time, as you may run multiple instances of the same courses, where only the date and the location will be different.
A training management platform can help you deal with the repetitive aspect of course management in a couple of different ways to ensure your courses are still managed effectively but enable you to spend your time on more important tasks.
For example, Administrate’s course templates allow you to set up your courses in a fraction of the time compared to doing them all separately. If you run many instances of the same course, where all the course information will stay the same apart from the date and possibly the location, then you can set up a course template for this course. This will mean that all the standardized information is saved in the course template, and will automatically be populated whenever you set up a new course using that template. The only information you’ll have to enter for each instance is the date and location if it’s changed.
2. Stop Losing Learner Information
Keeping track of all your learner information can be a difficult task if you don’t have a centralized system in place that everyone uses. If different members of your Internal Training team are keeping various contacts on their own computers, it can cause difficulties if they are out of the office, and someone else needs to get in touch with that learner. It also makes it easier for contact details to be mixed up or recorded incorrectly if multiple people are handling them, and it means there is no centralized record of all the interactions your internal training department has had with each learner.
Many training management platforms come with a built-in CRM, which enables you to keep track of all your learner records in one place, and also means you can link up the information with all the other parts of your training management platform. This means that everyone in your Internal Training department knows there is one central place to look for learner information, but also know there is only one place they should be storing and editing learner information to make sure it is visible to everyone.
With Administrate, learner records will also display any contact you’ve had with them. This prevents a learner from being contacted by several team members from within your business, as staff can quickly check whether they are already in the system, what contact you have already had with them, and what training sessions they have already been contacted about.
3. Stop Losing Track of Your Resources
Managing training in different offices, which could be based all over the world, is challenging for several reasons, but one main problem can be keeping track of all your training resources. From things going missing or getting broken, to trying to book a location which is actually in a different country, things can quickly go wrong when it comes to booking training resources, which can lead to disaster! If you’re not familiar with all the exact training resources your business has, it can be challenging to know what is available in each location and what has already been booked out!
Administrate’s resources management can help you deal with all these problems efficiently:
- Use Administrate to track all your resources, which allows you to have a complete list of everything you have access to for your training. This includes things like venues, computers, books, specialist training equipment, vehicles, etc. You can also add custom fields to be as detailed about each resource as you need to, to ensure everything is organized correctly.
- When you’re booking resources, you can make sure you only book them for the exact times you need them, so you’re not preventing someone else from making use of them. So if you have a course that runs every day for a week, but you only need a projector for one day, you can choose to book it for a single day instead of booking it for the duration of the course by default.
- Our system prevents you from double booking a resource, so you’ll never be left short again. If something is already booked out when you need it, it won’t even appear in the resources selection screen, so you can’t double book something by accident.
- You can mark resources as broken in Administrate, so you still have a record of them, but they cannot be booked onto events. As with double booking, if something is broken or out of service, it won’t appear in the selection list to avoid confusion.
- You can list the location of all your resources, so when you’re booking training sessions, you know which resources are available in your location.
4. Stop Missing Out on Feedback
After you’ve finished delivering your training, you may think your job is done, but getting feedback from your learners can provide valuable insight into your internal training offering, as well as giving you the chance to improve your training in the future.
However, we know creating surveys, sending them out, gathering the feedback, and then making it into something usable can be time-consuming, so it’s understandable when this element slips through the net.
Luckily, training management platforms like Administrate can take a lot of the hassle out of gathering feedback, to make sure you don’t miss out on this vital data:
- Surveys can be created from within Administrate, or through our SurveyMonkey integration, which you can save and use again and again.
- You can send surveys to whole training course lists in one go, and even set them to send as an automated communication a set time after the class has finished, so you don’t even need to worry about sending them manually.
- All the responses will be pulled back into Administrate, so you can easily study the data, and pull the data you need into our reporting system.
5. Stop Hiring More Staff
If you’re busy and feeling a bit run off your feet, you may think the answer is to hire more staff to lighten the load – but this isn’t always the answer! Hiring staff is expensive, and bringing them up to speed on your company’s processes can take a long time as well.
If you feel like your workload is too heavy, then it may be a better idea to look at your processes and see where you could save time there, instead of automatically deciding to hire more staff.
If your staff are spending a lot of time doing tasks manually, then making the move to a training management platform means a lot of these tasks can now be handled by the software instead of a member of staff. This leaves your team free to focus on the tasks that require the human touch, and all the other bits and pieces can be taken care of automatically. Additionally, with some of their workload being handled by your training management platform, they will also have extra time for additional tasks that may have taken a backseat before.
Overall, this means your training department will be getting a lot more work done but with the same amount of staff as before, giving you a lot more wiggle room before you need to look at hiring more staff.
