With the upcoming Kickstart Job Scheme, there is an emphasis being placed on the training and professional development that any placement will receive. We took this opportunity to review the way in which training records and why it is so important to keep such documents.
You can download a free template staff training record from our website, should you need one.
Why Keep Staff Training Records?
People often wonder why items like staff training records are used. With many focussing on the fact that a training record can be relied on when an employee isn’t performing to their required levels. Whilst this is of course true. There are far more positive uses of a staff training record.
High performance work practices, such as maintaining staff training records, and encouraging ongoing professional development leads to better outcomes for both businesses and their staff. A maintained training document should also form a basis of promoting employee participation with business processes, performance management and highlighting the need for ongoing training.
The staff training record is one tool, in an array of tools to promote positive employee engagement and interactions. If you are implementing this for the first time, use it as an opportunity to discuss training requirements with your team. It may be there is a gap that the employee has not felt comfortable raising, until now.
The Kickstarter Job Scheme Requirement For Training Records
Explicitly, the kickstart scheme requires the applicant to “include how you will help the participants to develop their skills and experience”. Our view is that any training and mentoring offered will need to be backed up with evidence, should the employer be asked. The employee training record delivers just that. A demonstrable timeline of all training that has occurred for each employee whilst working within the organisation.
Completing The Employee Training Record
The employee training record only contains a few elements pertaining to the training itself. This being:
The Name Of The Employee Training
This outlines the training that was given to the employee. Keep it simple, if you aren’t an ISO accredited company and there are no training or process documents to go with the training, make sure you can identify what was covered.
Date
This is the date of the training.
Name of Trainer
Name of the person conducting the training.
Employee Signature
The signature of the employee, we personally only get the employee to sign for this once they are competent in completing the action. We will discuss why shortly.
Employee Signature, Signing Off To Demonstrate Competence
By ensuring an employee only signs off the staff training record once they are competent. The reason we ensure we do this in such a fashion relates to the earlier point about high performance work practices. The rationale behind an employee signing off on their competence is simple. We shouldn’t be expecting staff members to complete works they don’t feel capable of delivering. The act of signing off on competence, promotes the opportunity for staff members to ask questions on certain topics. From a business perspective, we aren’t expecting staff members to be given a set of training, which may not have adequately met their own personal needs, then expecting them to complete a job. Doing so may simply create more corrective action for others, whilst demotivating the employee.
