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It’s important to track training, certifications, and licenses for your employees because it can help you make decisions about promotions and raises. When there is more than one qualified employee competing for the same job, the amount of training could be used as the determining factor to pick which employee will receive the promotion. Tracking certifications and licenses may be even more important for organizations that have specific industry or government requirements that their employees need to meet. Examples of employees that require certifications and licenses are nurses, teachers, hair stylists, and truck drivers. You’ll also want a foolproof way of making sure your employees remember to renew those certifications and licenses.

An old-fashioned way of tracking upcoming expiration dates for certifications and licenses is to take a big, paper desk calendar (or two) and handwrite the employee name and the name of the certification or license that will expire. A tickler file and Post-it notes are some other rudimentary ways of remembering expiration dates. Most recently, managers have been adding tasks to the Microsoft Outlook or other email management tools or online calendars. There are two main problems with these methods of tracking training, certifications, and license renewal dates. First, they don’t allow you to run reports listing upcoming expiration dates or employees who have not yet renewed a certification or license. These reports are helpful if you are trying to plan ahead before a vacation or during a leave of absence, or if you prefer to plan training for more than one employee at a time. The second problem is that you still need to document information about the certification or license in the employees’ human resource files. Instead of using two separate systems, you could save time consolidating these tasks. The fastest and easiest way to add training, certification, and license information to human resources documentation and a reminder alert system is to use human resources software.

In human resources software you’ll add both the start date/effective date and the end date/expiration date for every training, certification, and license record. For the training records, you’ll receive a reminder prior to the start date. For certification and license records, you’ll receive a reminder prior to the expiration date. When you enter the record, you’ll also add information about the hours, cost, agency, location, and notes, if applicable, all at the same time.

Human resources software will allow you to make one entry for multiple employees. If a group of employees all attended the same training, you could enter one training record for the entire group. Each individual employee training record would have the same dates, as well as information about hours, cost, agency, location, and notes, but you would only have to enter the training record once. It makes human resource documentation even faster.

Human resources software also has reports available that can show you reminders for upcoming expiration dates, employees who still need to renew a certification or license or hasn’t taken a required training class yet, and a list of training each employee has completed.

Human resources software will help you track training, certifications and licenses. Reminders for upcoming expiration dates will help ensure certifications and licenses stay up-to-date. You’ll save time with human resource documentation by adding the information into one system instead of having one method for reminders and another method for human resource files. The reports are an easy way to know exactly which employees have had and which ones need a specific training, certification, and license renewed.