It's a Good Time to Review Your Training Plans and Budgets

Once again during this unprecedented time of lockdowns, quarantines and social distancing, it's time for Compliance Professionals to look at those jobs that you almost never get around to.

This time let's review your training plans and training budgets.

This idea comes from an ongoing series of blogs that originated from "26 Ideas for Working from Home for Compliance Professionals".

Create a Training Needs Analysis

Reviewing your training plans and training budgets is one of those jobs that creeps up on you. It's typically about the same time as you do your performance reviews.

Often departments look at what they did last year and just ask for the same. The problem with this is it’s not effective, prone to making mistakes and wasting the organisation money.

The first thing to do is build a simple training needs analysis tool. A simple spreadsheet is fine for this task.

Here are some questions you need to ask yourself when creating a needs analysis are:

• Do I have trained people to cover the core functions of the business?
• What training is required to cover areas that we are weak on?
• Where does the data say that training is required?
• Would training have prevented some of my accidents or non-conformances from occurring?
• If the training is done internally, is the training material current and in a format that delivers the best training outcome?

Now Create Your Training Plan

Once you have done this exercise, you need to do the thing that most people forget to do and that is create a plan.

The needs analysis will highlight the gaps in training and which traning will give you the most "bang-for-your-buck". 

The plan is who will do the training and when will they do it. 

Here are a few items you should consider when creating your plan:

• Check who needs to be trained and by when?
• Is there a legal requirement for the training?
• Check the schedule of when the training should occur. Note: it should enable the training to occur without effecting production and can it be spend throughout the year.
• Will it be internal or external training?
• Who will deliver the training?
• List the costs. Even internal training has a costs and should be budgeted.
• How will you determine if the training was effective?

Time to Create Your Training Budget

One of the reasons that organisations don’t do training or don’t get training approved, is because they don’t put the effort into creating a comprehensive plan that management can review and put costs into their budgets.

Remember the best plans get budget approved because it can be justified.

For Management, the training budget needs to go to the areas with the greatest needs and delivers the most value.

Remember, unplanned training is often too referred to as “the great training robbery”. This is when an organisation just forks out money with no real reason. Don't fall into that trap.

Now, more than ever, it's a great time to get your plans and budgets in order. So that when things turnaround you are in a great position to implement them.

Go for it now!