Growing up, my dad would always point out advertisements in a silly way. What I mean by this is: when he would see an advertisement for a tanning salon with really fit people, he would say “Wow, if I go in there - I’ll come out looking like that!” And he wasn’t just referring to the shade of the person’s skin. Advertisement is powerful and marketing departments work hard to showcase benefits - tangible or intangible, but sometimes that can set consumers up with high expectations that can’t be met. As much as I wish applying sunless tanner would then give me a six-pack, that’s an expectation that absolutely will come to actualization…. bummer.

Whether you’re already using a training database, looking to create your own from scratch, or shopping around for one for the very first time. We have created a list of the do-not-skip when purchasing (or even creating) a training database. These features and functions will make sure that no training is skipped, all employees have passed their respective trainings, managers are notified, and the process is repeatable - not to mention, scalable.

Microsoft Access, a software that comes within the Microsoft Office Suite, is known as an even better alternative to Microsoft Excel when it comes to creating a training database to track the training of your individual employees, monitor certification renewals, and more. While the software is robust enough to create tools to track other need-to-knows like job proposals, performance reviews, receipts and more, and can be used as a storage system for information that falls within these categories, the software can get just as cluttered as Excel. The information can become difficult to sort, search through, and ultimately loses its purpose other than a glorified holding place for lots of information that is important not to lose.

Across most businesses, there is some sort of training that takes place. Whether this training is to keep employees abreast of the latest trends across the industry, or simply onboarding an employee with relevant HR information or organizational practices, it doesn’t matter. Each and every training that is completed to advance careers or to remain informed of changes should be documented by the relevant personnel to ensure there is no oversight.

Whether you’re new to online education systems, or e-Learning, it is important to get on the same page as your vendor or sales person to really get the most out of what may be taught as it relates to your learning management system. A quick review of the most common terms used when it relates to learning management systems and online training will be helpful for quick education and to get you up to speed when talking about your new software.

So, you, possibly a training manager, believe that your company could benefit from adopting a Learning Management System (LMS), but your boss isn’t exactly on board? Convincing senior level executives can be a challenging task, especially where software is concerned. There are learning curves, expenditures, training, and more and proving how it impacts the bottom line can be challenging and oftentimes, that is exactly what your boss is the most concerned about. If your company has some sort of training program in place, isn’t that enough? What does your organization stand to gain from adopting a Learning Management System?

Compliance Management is evident in all businesses, large and small, new or old. While the types of compliance management necessary for success may not look the same, the underlying need for compliance is there and in many cases, controlled by more than one overseeing agency. From Federal to state governments, industry auditors and regulations, to meeting qualifications standards and certifications in an individual role - compliance is here to stay. Thankfully, with the robust growth seen in the learning management system industry, there is a much easier way to stay up on compliance efforts without adding a new product or vendor to manage.

Oftentimes it is standard practice to measure learning and development across an organization by levels of compliance. Compliance standards are typically set outside the company and audited, however, they can also expand to practices such as onboarding a new employee. In the latter case, employees go through onboarding to achieve a certain level of compliance that will deem them capable of working on their own, or show managers that they have at least marked a checkbox.

Within the VAIRKKO Certification Cloud, there is a new feature that is extremely helpful to all users of the platform. Now the platform integrates with other calendar applications such as Outlook, Google Calendar and more to keep track of expiring certifications. What does this mean for end users? Now it is possible for each user to gain access to a unique subscription URL that syncs their expiring certifications, trainings and more and add it to their own calendars for management purposes. This means that end users do not need to log into the VAIRKKO platform to keep up to date with expiration's that need to continue to be monitored and updated.

VAIRKKO’s Certification Cloud has always had a feature that allowed administrators or managers within the system to create Compliance Rules. These rules were a way to measure an employee’s adherence to a set of rules whether required by a governing and oversight agency, or what is valued within an organization. Once compliance rules are set up, it takes a click of a button to measure every employee against the standard to ensure a company is meeting its compliance targets.