How to successfully automate the employee training process

Every employee needs efficient and effective training for your business to run smoothly. Implementing and executing such a training process isn’t easy, though. Most HR and training professionals love taking a hands-on approach with employees, which is great — but it means training tends to be a manual, time-consuming, and often inefficient process.

The solution is to automate the employee training process using online software, making training convenient, less expensive to administer, and more effective. Here’s everything you need to know to get started.

Know your why

Before you can start automating your training process, you need to have a plan and know why you’re conducting training in the first place.

Start by determining what you want your employee training program to achieve, says Mike Kappel, founder and CEO of Patriot Software. “Otherwise,” he writes, “you might waste everyone’s time with useless information and unstructured training.”

Next, outline each part of your training program. This will allow you to identify which parts you can automate easily and those that you’ll still have to deliver in person. While every organization’s training is different, there are several common areas that almost all of them can automate.

Use online forms for registration

The easiest part of the training process to automate is registration. Most requests for training require businesses to collect standardized information from employees, including name, contact information, department, availability, and the type of training they want.

Rather than asking employees to email this information to HR, give them access to an online form. This offers a faster and more standardized approach.

Using Jotform’s training application form, for instance, HR professionals can quickly collect all the information they need from employees. Your HR team could automatically send a form like this to new hires to get them started on their training as quickly as possible.

Create and manage an online repository

Another strategy to automate the training process is to create an online database from which HR professionals can track and monitor each employee’s training history.

Jotform Tables, for example, offers a much more agile solution than an Excel spreadsheet or a whiteboard. You can sort and filter data to quickly see how different departments are performing. And you can even share the entire database with your team, making collaboration a lot easier.

Jotform Tables also integrates with our online forms, meaning that whenever an employee submits a training request through a form, their information will automatically be recorded in the table.

Automate workflows

Your HR team can assign and manage training easily using automated workflows. The workflows can automatically assign specific training materials to employees using the information they supplied in the online training request form.

This feature takes a huge amount of work off HR professionals’ plates. They don’t have to spend time assigning specific training to specific employees; it’s all handled automatically using the information supplied in the online form.

Use online forms for registration

You can also use forms to create quizzes that quickly determine whether employees have fully digested the training material. Quizzes are particularly powerful when it’s easy to measure the employee’s grasp of the subject matter, writes Christopher Pappas, founder of  eLearningIndustry.

Generate reports

There’s no point bringing your employee training system online if you can’t generate reports from it. A good training automation solution will automatically create reports that let you see core KPIs, like completion results, training history, and exam scores. You can also automate the report creation so that they’re generated every month.

Jotform’s table templates allow users to quickly analyze data, generate charts and graphs, and download PDF reports. Better still, Jotform Tables can automatically create documents from your data so you can quickly share them with stakeholders in your business.

Automating any process can be an enormous help to HR teams, says Tania Fiero, chief human resources officer at Innovative Employee Solutions. The benefits aren’t a given, though. Guarantee your success by first determining the goal of your employee training program and then identifying the parts you can successfully automate.

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