4 Project Setbacks Caused by Low Employee Training Transparency

Without insight into your workforce’s skills and training history, you’re missing essential information on a core asset.

Whatever industry you’re in, growing your organization depends on reliably meeting your goals. The project milestones you set, whether for internal strategic improvements or external client contracts, should be a healthy challenge: driving you to stretch your capabilities while still being within reach. It’s that incremental progress that allows you to aim higher each time.

In order to navigate the ambitious projects that will grow your organization, you need a clear view of where you are now—and a map for the road ahead. That’s where training transparency comes in. Without it, you’re operating with one hand tied behind your back, you’re still in the dark about your workforce’s true skills, and you won’t have a detailed picture of the progress you’re making. That puts you at risk for missteps and setbacks in your work.

But the right technology can help you gain visibility into your teams’ skills and potential. And with it, you can build a development plan that accelerates your workforce’s growth and sets you up for success in the strategic projects you decide to take on. Here are four critical hurdles you could face without employee training transparency, and how L&D technology can help you avoid them.

1. Projects run inefficiently due to mismatched qualifications.

Plenty of projects require the staff or organizations working on them to hold special qualifications: permits, licensing, certificates, specialized education, and more. These requirements are common in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction (AEC) & Manufacturing industries, but aren’t limited to them. A missing permit or qualification can bring a project to a halt while staff are reassigned or trained appropriately, or worse, lead to rework and increased costs if work is done incorrectly. 

With more visibility into the training history and credentials of your workforce, these kinds of delays are much less likely. You can ensure your organization secures the necessary permits and assigns project team members with confidence, considering not only their qualifications but also essential soft skills like communication, which can subtly yet significantly enhance overall efficiency. For example, choose a team lead who’s both a subject matter expert and has project management trainingor a cross-functional liaison who has experience with both design and construction. Greater transparency helps you match employees to project roles that let them shine. 

Gain the insights you need with:

• Skill assessments establish a comprehensive view of what your workforce can do
• Skills reporting isolates information about the most relevant skills for a particular project 
• Credential management keeps permits and certificates easily accessible, both for your reference and so you can quickly provide them to inspectors

2. Uncertainty about training progress leads to inaccurate project timelines.

Projects that incorporate employee development already have some amount of variability in their timelines. Chasing genuinely innovative goals can require workforces to upskill quickly and embrace new technologies, but project milestones will inherently depend on workers’ progress through their training materials. 

Even with perfect information, predicting something as individual as learning is a challenge. Without visibility into employees’ actual progress, it becomes almost impossible. To set realistic timelines for these kinds of projects, managers need insight into their teams’ current knowledge and how far they’ve moved through their required courses. 

Project timelines are a key tool for communicating with stakeholders and demonstrating return on investment. Milestones give you a way to set expectations with organizational leadership or with external clients, and achieving them provides concrete evidence of the project’s value. If timelines are unclear, however, or milestones go unmet, the project can suffer a loss of confidence from leadership on top of its own delays.

Visualize training progress with:

• Utilization reports that demonstrate rates of user adoption and engagement
• Completion tracking which reveals user movement through required courses

3. Unmet safety regulations stall project work.

Safety is especially crucial for projects in the AEC & Manufacturing space, but can come into play broadly across industries. Construction projects, equipment operation, food preparation, and more can all carry strict safety regulations, and in some cases, the project may be the first time employees are exposed to them. 

Ensuring rigorous safety training protects the well-being of your workforce, but it also minimizes the risk of compliance penalties and work stoppages. To be sure of your safety training efforts, you need confidence that courses have been assigned and completed, and documentation that will satisfy regulators to avoid interrupting work. 

Reinforce safe practices with:

• Learning assignments that can include individual documents or entire courses and allow managers to confirm completion.
• Performance monitoring to ensure satisfactory results and provide proof of accomplishment.

4. Repetitive training wastes time and breeds dissatisfaction.

Time is money, and no project stakeholder likes to see their time wasted—whether they’re an outside client, an organizational leader, or a team member. Learning is key to high performance and to executing well on project goals, but when employees are forced to do redundant trainings, work progress slows. Workers aren’t learning anything new, but aren’t able to deliver project work either, making the return on investment essentially nil. Workers themselves can feel frustrated and bored by a lack of progress, and disrespected due to their existing skills being ignored. 

Dissatisfied team members present an urgent problem. They may disengage from work, causing inefficiencies and declining performance. They may also choose to leave the project or the organization entirely, forcing a backfill process that’s costly in terms of both time and money. By contrast, transparency enables targeted, efficient training with a clear connection to project outcomes—a connection that workers and other stakeholders can align with, keeping engagement high and boosting the odds of good outcomes.

Keep training effective with:

• Learning histories that provide a clear background of the project team members’ training
• Skill assessments that let team members demonstrate their expertise
• Customizable courses that managers can adapt to fill the gaps in teams’ preexisting skills

Pinnacle Series is the complete knowledge platform for project success.

There’s no question that employee development is crucial to a high-performing workforce. Executed well, L&D can help you avoid a slew of costly project pitfalls. But to deliver on the promise of a robust L&D strategy, you need the right technology to build on.

Eagle Point’s flagship Learning Management System (LMS), Pinnacle Series, is a comprehensive, flexible knowledge platform combining a deep content library with powerful training tools. With Pinnacle Series, you can build an efficient development strategy that not only shields you from project setbacks—it also unlocks new levels of success. Tackle the projects that will define your organization’s future with the support of Pinnacle Series. Contact us today to learn more.