Training Operations

How to Schedule Your Internal Training Courses

Kim Morrison 8 minute read

If the thought of sitting down and scheduling your internal training course programme for the upcoming training period is giving you the fear, then we’re here to show you that Administrate could be the perfect tool for you!

Our training management system is perfect for training departments and has loads of functionality to help support your internal training offering!

Let’s take a look at just some of the ways we can make scheduling your internal training courses much simpler!

Upload Staff Details to CRM

CRM spelled out in blocks

The first thing you want to do is to upload all your staff details to Administrate’s built-in CRM. Not only will this provide you with a place to keep a secure record of all your staff details, but it will also allow you to use this information across other parts of Administrate without having to re-upload the info multiple times. It also means you no longer need to use a separate CRM and you can manage everything training-related from one central system.

Once you have all your staff details uploaded, you can assign your team members as students to the training sessions that you have scheduled. It also makes it easy to search for students and view their complete training history, or the courses they are signed up to in the future if you need to.

Our CRM also allows you to add custom fields to your contact records, so you can store all the relevant information you need to for each staff member rather than trying to make things fit into pre-decided fields.

Schedule All Your Courses in One Place

Desk calendar

The next stage of setting up all your training is to schedule your courses with Administrate’s course management functionality. There are several ways Administrate can support you through this process and make the whole thing straightforward.

Supports Different Learning Types

Administrate is designed to support any type of learning you have on offer, and not just traditional classroom-based sessions. This means you can schedule and manage all your courses from one location, instead of having to swap between different systems for different types of training.

Whether you want to run classroom-based sessions, eLearning, blended learning, or virtual instructor-led training (VILT), Administrate has the tools to support you and make setting up your courses really easy!

Create Course Templates

One way we can make setting up your courses super speedy is through the use of course templates. Course templates allow you to template the basic information for every training course you run, such as the course name, duration, course content, qualification gained, etc. This means whenever you want to schedule an instance of that course you can start with the template, and most of the information filled out for you, rather than having to type out duplicate data again and again. Instead, you’ll only have to enter the changeable data such as the instructor’s name, the date, and the time!

You can have as many course templates as you need for the number of courses you run, so setting up lots of courses in bulk will no longer be a total headache and will take just a fraction of the time! 

Check Staff Availablity 

When it comes to setting up training, it’s important to make sure that everyone that needs to be present for the training can actually attend. Rather than lots of back and forward emails between your Internal Training team and your staff members, you can use Administrate to make the task much more manageable.

When staff have upcoming holidays, they can be logged in Administrate, making it really easy for your Internal Training team to get a calendar view of the forthcoming holidays and schedule upcoming training around this.

Check Resource Availablity

Another handy tool for course scheduling is Administrate’s resource tracker, which allows you to log all your available training resources in one place. This could be classrooms, projectors, computers, books, desks, or specialist training equipment such as vehicles or first aid dummies. Basically, anything that you need to run a training session successfully can count as a training resource.

When you set up a training course, you want to ensure you have everything you need for that course, and that’s where’s Administrate comes in. Once you have all your resources logged, you can easily assign them to the relevant training courses. This means that whoever is setting up the course on the day will know everything that needs to be in place.

It also means that once you have booked a resource onto a course, it cannot be double booked, as it will no longer show in the available resources list within Administrate. This means you can be confident that once you have something booked it will be there on the day when you need it! It also alerts you to potential conflicts ahead of time, so you know if you need to source additional resources in advance.

Set Up Task Workflows 

As well as knowing what resources you need in advance, you can also use task workflows to ensure you are totally prepared for each and every course.

Task workflows are basically a to-do list that you need to complete for each course, but it means you don’t need to create it from scratch every time. Instead, you can simply create a task workflow specific for each course and save it within Administrate. That means when it’s time to set up for first aid course, for example, you can assign the first aid course task workflow to the course and have a ready-made to-do list waiting to go!

Not only does this cut down on duplicate data entry and save you loads of time, but it also means that whoever is organising the training course on the day will have a to-do list to work through, so you don’t need to worry about handling everything yourself.

Set Up Personalised Learning Paths for Staff Members

Teaching

If you want to set up learning plans for your staff members, then Administrate’s learning paths is a great way to do this. It allows you to decide on the courses that each staff member or department or role will have to complete in a certain period, including the order in which they need to finish them.

Using Administrate in this way makes it really easy for you to lay out the learning paths for your team and then share them with everyone, so both your Internal Training team and your staff members have a total overview of the training they are expected to complete.

It also means when students work their way through the training, it can automatically be tracked within Administrate, so it’s effortless to see what still needs to be done and how far along their learning journey each team member is.

Rather than your staff having to continually check what training they have done and what they still need to complete, they can simply log into Administrate and have complete visibility in an instant.

Assign Staff to Their Training Courses

eLearning

Once all your training courses are set up, the next stage is to add your staff to the relevant sessions. You can do this in several ways:

  • Your Training Administration team can add students manually on the page for each course within Administrate.
  • If you run optional training sessions, you can send out links to allow staff to sign up for sessions themselves.
  • You can create learning paths for your team members, and when they are assigned to a learning path, they will be automatically signed up for all the courses included in that path.

Make Use of Automated Communications

Blue email button on keyboard

If you’re signing staff members up yourself, then it’s important to make them aware of the training they need to attend, and all the details involved.

This is a great chance to make use of Administrate’s automated communications feature, meaning your Internal Training team won’t have to spend ages sending loads of emails and instead can let Administrate handle it all automatically.

All you need to do is set up all the different templates you will need when you need to communicate with your staff about training. In this case, it will be registration details, informing them of the course they have been assigned to, as well as all the details relating to that course. Merge fields will personalise the email for each student and course automatically.

You can then set up a communication trigger to fire that email whenever a new registration is completed, and your team members will automatically receive all the details they need the minute they are booked on to a course.

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