Employees are the real drivers of safety performance as they are at the forefront of organizations’ business processes. Due to their influence as the people doing the job and managing everyday risk, competence is key for the growth and profitability of a business. Every business process that is performed by employees must have the relevant competency requirements well defined. Employers must conduct competency needs assessment of each business process and build an adequate matrix of skills and training programs relevant for addressing those needs in order for employees to perform their roles safely and effectively. In this post, I share the best training matrix template and why a spreadsheet format offers the best solution.

The reference standard for employee competence and awareness

The reference standard for improving employee competence and awareness is enshrined in the clause 7.2 and 7.3 of the ISO 45001:2018 standard.

According to Clause 7.2, organizations must determine the necessary competence of workers that affects the performance and effectiveness of their OH&S management system; ensure that workers are competent on the basis of appropriate education, training, or experience and take actions to acquire and maintain the necessary competence, evaluate the effectiveness of the actions taken and retain appropriate documented information as evidence of competence.

Secondly, clause 7.3 of the standard requires organizations to ensure that workers are aware of the OHS policy and OHS objectives, their contribution to the effectiveness of the OH&S system including the benefits of improved OH&S performance, the implications and potential consequence of not conforming to the OHS management system requirements and not fulfilling the organization’s compliance objectives; including incidents and the outcomes of investigations, hazards, OHS risks and actions that are relevant to them; and their ability to remove themselves from work situations that present an imminent and serious danger to their life or health.

Identifying, maintaining and improving employee competence, training and awareness is an importance aspect of an effective health and safety management system and this is achieved using a training matrix template.

What is a training matrix?

A training matrix is a tool for organizing the skills and training needs of employees and the relevant training programs in an organized fashion for easy implementation for each job function. The content of a training matrix will include the list of workers within an organization, the list of qualifications and training programs for meeting specific skill needs and the status of those qualifications, training programs and skills in terms of whether they have been closed or open.  Training matrix presents a better way of demonstrating how an organization is managing and improving its workforce. Training matrix also helps in key decision making by top management to quickly identify the training gaps at a glance for improvement in order to thrive as a business. These requirements can be easy to present on a training matrix template to make the process and life very simple.

What is the process of building a training matrix?

The process of building a training matrix begins with competency needs assessment, a process that involves identifying and defining the roles and responsibilities of the key business process within your business functions and evaluating the tasks to be performed by employees to identify the training needs, skills and qualifications relevant to enable them to perform their task effectively and safely.  A number of ways to identify training needs, skills and qualifications for key position is by checking with the enforcement authority of the industry in which your firm operates to identify the legal and industry requirements for specific jobs, and checking from clients’ job competence requirements as per contracts awarded and finally from your organization’s own management system requirements as developed by a competent consultant. It is also important to identify which of those training needs, programs and qualifications require renewal.

Once training or skill requirements have been identified, it is important to list the names of your employees and their training/skills or competencies that are relevant for them to function effectively and evaluate each employee and identify their training needs from the list of training requirements, and record it for their job role.

What are the benefits of maintaining a training matrix?

Training matrix helps an organization to manage and improve employee competence, training and awareness in a systematic order. Without a training matrix this process becomes very complex and cumbersome to the extent that organization could lose track of who has been trained or not, which therefore creates a situation where employees experience skill fade leading to an increased risk of workplace accidents and injuries and the associated cost of accidents to the business.

Another benefit of maintaining a training matrix is that, once training matrix is adequately completed, you are able to see the training gaps or the shortfalls in skills for each employee for the needed improvement. Training matrix provides adequate information of the level of competence of an employee for proper work allocation and decision for extra support such as supervision and buddy system.

Also, training matrix provides a systematic method of ensuring continuous improvement  for higher productivity through the easy identification of highly  trained workforce for a high risk job. Instantly, decision makers can know which employee to engage for projects for one reason or the other.

Training matrix also boosts confidence in clients to result in more contracts as clients are able to appreciate the systematic approach to training and retraining of employees based their risk exposure and the ability to manage safely with or without supervision. It also helps in succession planning and up-skilling of workforce based on a structured approach. This increases the morale and motivation of the workforce as they feel valued and in turn reciprocate by delivering their best.

Last but not the least, decision makers can at a glance know whether the workforce training are in date or about to expire in order to ensure a proactive approach to keep employee competence up to date.

The advantages of spreadsheet templates

People are quick to dismiss spreadsheet templates simply because for a very long time the health and safety profession has not be revolutionized by very powerful spreadsheet templates that are agile enough with dynamic dashboards for effective reporting. The great news is that, we at SHEQXEL are safety professionals with deep insight and skill to develop templates to dismiss any misconception about health and safety spreadsheet templates. How cool is it to adopt very cheap spreadsheets that perform the job even much better than web based software and make your safety job much easier.

There is a misconception that constant human effort is required to managed spreadsheet. That is not true, given that with automations from advance excel functions, the human elements is entirely reduced to just data entry.

Spreadsheet templates can easily be customized to take into account changes in health and safety priorities at no extra due to low cost of maintenance as compared to web based software with expensive programming that have high cost of maintenance hence quite difficult to adapted to every user’s need.

Spreadsheets can also prevent human errors in many ways. For example by inserting data validation for certain sensitive data, locking and password protecting cells with formulas and keeping the process of data entry very simple are some of the very unique features of our templates.

They are easy to extract information, analyze and project onto very beautiful dashboards, well curated to improve user experience. Spreadsheets are the best thing that has happened to the safety profession. They’re available on most office computers and therefore they’re cheap to use.

The best spreadsheet training matrix template

If you are looking for a simple but effective training matrix template to plan for the training needs of your workforce and to monitor progress made on trainings, then try our spreadsheet template.

This is a great tool for maintaining a schedule of training programs for your entire workforce. After having identified the training needs of employees, you need a system for tracking all the courses or programs each staff has been marked to complete in order to enhance their competence and to comply with your own management system requirements, industry training requirements and client specific training requirements.

Our unique training matrix template makes tracking training very simple. It automatically estimates percentage level of training for all programs, next training dates, training due days, overall percentage level of training completed for all staff, percentage of outstanding training not yet completed and percentage level of compliance with training matrix for each staff. All of the above are captured on the dashboard to present an overview of the training in an organization.

There is also an Approved List where users must update their list of training programs they are planning for their workforce, including their frequencies and no of days on a frequency table. Users can track up to 100 training topics for over 400 employees.

Our training matrix template is very user friendly. Users must complete a database of their workforce by providing their full names, employee ID, department, job title, line manager and project if applicable. They must then plan for their training programs by selecting training topic from the dropdown to automatically set the training frequency. Users can then identify if training is desired by the worker by entering 1 and also enter 1 if training has been done. By entering the date of training, the next training date will automatically be set based on the frequency of training and also the days due for next training will begin to count down. The days due for next training has been conditionally formatted to show green for due days over 30 days, yellow for due days between 1 and 30 and finally red for days overdue.

There are various other reports such as the training program status and the employee training status which users can use to take a deep dive into various programs and persons by using the slicers. These sheets have been provided to account for large database and also for sending as report to top management.

Training matrix tutorial video

This is the best tool for monitoring progress and maintaining compliance with your training program.

Grab your copy and thank me later 🙂

Sel 💫 at SHEQXEL. Connect with Sel 💫 on LinkedIn

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