For life science and high tech companies employee training is obviously essential. Employee training is also regulated by the FDA, ISO and additional regulatory agencies or organizations. For life science and high tech professionals employee training must be a priority but like many quality related processes manages to fall through the crack, especially during periods of critical design, planning or peak production when lack of employee training can often be the result of nonconformance, deviations, marketing delays and product recalls.
Real REALITY for Life Science and High Tech Companies
The reality for life science and high tech companies is that most companies, especially large enterprises find it difficult or virtually impossible to consistently maintain initial, annual, semi-annual, remedial and/or follow-up employee training sessions. For especial manufacturing companies the process can become particularly tedious when hundreds of employees work varying shifts and have a multitude of various start dates and an array of needs for a variety of training options.
Automating Employee Training
Life science and high tech companies NEED to become aware of the automated employee training solutions that are available for their specific needs. Life science and high tech companies also need to be aware of the many benefits that a high quality training solution can provide.
Some of these benefits are listed as follows:
Tracking- Since productive employee training procedures require a host of forms or documentation to plan, coordinate, assign, officiate, escalate and follow-up on effective training processes, life science and high tech companies should find an employee training solution that tracks training forms and links essential training information. The solution should also facilitate the quick location and analysis of training data for accelerate post-training actions and simplified internal and external audit processes.
Connections- The process of employee training is NOT a lone entity. Employee training orders are often the direct or indirect result of deviations identification, nonconformance identification, customer complaints information, CAPA investigations or change control results and should be connected to solutions that will automatically trigger training assignments when the data deems it necessary to do so. For example, life science and high tech companies should be actively searching for an employee training solution that is integrated with deviations, nonconformance, customer complaints, CAPA and change control software. These solutions (or solution) should directly or indirectly trigger (automatically) training tasks for dozens or even hundreds of employees.
Accountability- Ideally, every life science or high tech employee would take part in and be accountable for his or her own training responsibilities. The “ideal” training scenario is rarely the realistic result however. Most training responsibilities fall directly into the laps of one or two overworked training supervisors. With an employee training software solution however, employees can be automatically notified via email of training tasks which are tracked (and escalated if they are not completed on or near the training deadline) from start to finish. These features relocate responsibility and accountability into the hands of the employee himself (or herself) and ideally require him or her to sign off from each respective training task. A field for employee comments is also valuable since the training supervisor will be able to see and seek to understand the especial training concerns of each individual employee.
Configurable- A configurable solution is the ONLY solution for life science and high tech companies. After all, some companies have a multitude of employees while others have but a few. Some companies require quarterly training or periodic product related trainings while other companies require only annual education. Some companies may not need to integrate the solution with a representative solution for every other quality management process. For this reason the configurability of a product is of the utmost importance.
Conclusion
For life science and high tech companies with a large number of employees automated employee training solutions are the most efficient way to garner time and invaluable ROI.
Marci Crane is a copywriter for MasterControl in Salt Lake City, Utah. For more information in regards to automated employee training software solutions, please feel free to contact a MasterControl representative.
