When it comes to being organized and managing your internal training offerings, it’s tempting to think that spreadsheets are a good way to keep track of everything. While they may start as a convenient option, continuing to use spreadsheets as your training offering grows could end up wasting a lot of time and creating more work for your internal training staff.
Let’s take a look at just a few of the reasons to ditch the spreadsheets and make a move to a more tailored solution, such as a training management platform.
It’s Easy to Share Information Among Team Members
The reason you’re trying to find a system to organize and keep track of the training courses you are running, who is taking them and their assessment results is probably to make life easier for your internal training team. Using a system like spreadsheets will make it challenging for team members to share data.
If your entire team is trying to work from one document, it can create a lot of problems. First of all, different team members may be working from different versions of the same document, which can cause consistency issues. If they are saving documents on their computers and then emailing them to other people, there could be a few copies of the same document, and each team member could have different versions of the same information.
Trying to collate all these different versions of the data into one complete document is a waste of time and effort for your team, and it’s something that you can avoid by using a training management platform instead of spreadsheets. With a training management platform, because you save everything online, all of your team members can work on the same data at the same time, without worrying about whether anyone is creating different versions that will cause confusion down the line.
Using a training management platform also means that your staff always know exactly where to look to find the information they need, and they know that there is one centralized place where they need to update data. If team members are working on many spreadsheets, on the other hand, they may waste time trying to figure out where a document is currently stored, making sure it’s the most up-to-date version or emailing other team members to ask them for the document.
Working centrally from a training management platform means that you store and update all training data in only one place, so your staff always know where to go.
You Can Use Information Across Channels
A major benefit of training management platforms is that you can use the information stored within the system anywhere you need it, without needing to import and export data multiple times. This capability saves times and effort for you and your team members and makes it easier to perform your jobs.
With a training management platform, you can access all your training data, such as participation metrics for certain time periods, the classes you are currently running and learners’ previous training records, wherever you need to. You can easily create reports, assign learners to courses, send surveys to learners, collect feedback and much more.
Using one centralized system, and being able to use the same data across many different places, makes more sense than having multiple single systems that you must move between. A training management platform creates a more streamlined workflow for your team members and helps your internal training department perform at full efficiency.
You Don’t Have to Worry About Saving or Losing Files
Another primary advantage of using a cloud-based training management platform is that you can always be sure that your data is safe and secure. When many people are working on the same spreadsheets, it can be easy to forget to save after making an update, to make a mistake that can’t easily be undone or to accidentally delete the document altogether. Working online will help you avoid these problems. You can quickly revert to a previous version of your data if you do make a mistake, and you can be sure that your data will never be deleted entirely or lost if someone’s computer breaks.
Spreadsheets are helpful for many tasks. However, when it comes to managing the complex processes associated with internal training, they are usually not up to the task. Training management platforms are the solution for efficient, effective learning and development.
