How to manage employee courses and qualifications using HRMS

Employee courses and qualifications can be a strong motivation tool, although fees and costs can add up quickly when external to your company. Are you getting the maximum value on your employee investment? Information on who is certified, qualified or has taken courses can be a goldmine when you’re looking for an employee with a particular talent or needing to demonstrate compliance. Make sure that you can find that needle in the haystack by using your HRMS to effectively manage and document courses, training, certifications etc. Here are some tips to get started:

Define your business policies and build your system use around that design

Will every course and certificate be tracked in your HRMS? Who will be responsible for entering the setup data and employee data? Are any approvals needed in the system to register for a course? As you seek to answer questions such as these, the design for procedures and the system should occur hand in hand to ensure a seamless and efficient experience for the user.

Employee courses and qualifications data can be a tricky area of the HRMS to regulate as different providers offer similar items. Will you end up with a list like this: Excel 1, Beginner’s Excel, Excel I etc? You need to have a strong governance policy in place and HRMS system stewards who can manage the data effectively both for entry and reporting purposes.

Recommended Reading: HRMS Software Guide - Find HRMS software to help manage employee courses and qualifications

Use employee self-service strategically

In some instances, you may want HR to view an original course completion certificate, while in others an employee’s upload of a certification or self-certification of a qualification may be sufficient. The last thing that you need is to create an administrative burden on already stretched HR teams. For ‘nice to have’ data, consider if self-service via your HRMS will fit the bill.

I have often seen companies bite off more than they can chew when setting up course and qualification tracking in an HRMS only to throw the towel in after six months when it’s seen as too much of an administrative burden with little reward. Self-service can alleviate much of the burden on some of this secondary data. As well, you often end up with more data when employees see it as a career benefit to provide this data.

Employee courses, certifications and qualifications are often very useful pieces of data. Most HRMS offer such functionality out of the box, so what are you waiting for?