Setting up a training program?

Submitted by Suzanne Brown
in
General Questions and Comments

After 18 months of diligently following the advice of our friends at M-T I was recently promoted.  Hooray!  

Now the hard work begins. My new position is a newly created role within our department to set up a training protocol for all of the employees (about 150).  This will include new hire on-boarding, existing employee cross-training, some leadership development (additional to the corporate stuff), and some skill-specific training for individual teams.  

I'm excited and my mind is running in a million directions with all the things I want to accomplish.  I have a variety of ideas for getting started but I'm wondering if anyone else out here has done something similar.

Any tales of successes or speedbumps I can learn from?

Submitted by Shane MacQuarrie on Tuesday May 6th, 2014 4:08 pm

SuzanneB,
I helped set up a training program for my site, with a lot of help from others, that covers on-boarding new employees only.
We identified what training needs to happen for new employees and contract employees.
Most of this is driven by regulatory agencies (FAA) and our Corporate requirements, but it helped us to develop something that was manageable.

We started out with about 136 employees and are currently sitting at 185.
We will finish at somewhere close to 200 employees.

The easiest way to start is to determine what training is required by job description. We started with lumping everyone under the same umbrella but quickly found that this required several "extra" assignments.
Eventually we divided it by general function (administrative, technician, modifier, supervisor, Quality Control, etc.). Once we did this we were able to develop some training and ensure that others were assigned correctly and followed up on to drive completion.
To accomplish this, we developed a spreadsheet that asks for a few data points and then it will automatically populate the required training for each role as new employees are brought on board.
We are still trying to develop something similar for continued growth but have hit a few snags with that.

I hope this helps plant some ideas for you.

Mac
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