Top 3 tips for expediting training program administration

How much time do you and your team spend administering your training programs?

Your answer might provide some clues into operational efficiency and effectiveness of new hire and ongoing training.

According to a survey we completed in Q1 2024 with Plant Services, it isn’t just the managers who are administering training. A whopping 13% of critical maintenance technicians, such as skilled trades and others who work to keep your equipment up and running, spend a significant amount of time simply administering training programs: 5-8 hours a week.

This means that these highly skilled non-manager team members are sacrificing up to a full day every single week just to assign, track, and manage your training programs.

Survey results for maintenance supervisors indicate that they spend even more time administering training programs – 1/3 spend 5-8 hours on just administration and 1 in 5 are spending over a day every single week with this same tedious work, preventing them from attending to other duties. This statistic might be more in line with how managers spend their time, but it is still excessive.

If this is your reality, it is time to find new efficiencies and better ways to get your team on board with training. After all, no one should be delaying training in an industrial setting: training is one of the top ways to prevent workplace accidents and injuries – and unplanned downtime.

3 Tips for prioritizing your training programs while reducing time spent administering them:

1. Make training a no-brainer to increase course completion. Talk about how training reduces accidents and near misses, increases confidence, and reduces downtime. Making it about their wellbeing makes training an easier pill to swallow and increases employee buy-in to the training process.
2. Increasing employee engagement in training topics. Let your team talk about best practices they gleaned from training. Give your team the floor after they complete their assigned courses so they can tell their peers about the best tricks they learned from training.
3. Streamline training administration by adopting a more efficient learning management system. Regardless how engaged your team is in their training, administrators can save time with a more efficient system.

We might be biased, but our learning management system, FUSION, is the tool that will help you foster your most efficient training program yet:

1. Track, manage, assign, and see results of training efforts in real time.
2. No physical paper trail required: save space and time rummaging through file cabinets by taking storage to the cloud.
3. Set up reports one time and have them automatically sent to you at a frequency that works for you.
4. Access the platform 24/7, so any leader on any shift can administer your training program and your team can train when they are at work.
5. Provide training courses from any business-facing Certus brand in one centralized platform– with topics related to technical skills, safety, and more.

Have you tried any of these tactics? Let us know how successful you were and if you’ve found other ways to improve engagement and reduce administration time in the comments.