If employees work without their required certifications, a business can be fined and halted. For example, someone operating heavy machinery without certification can stop the manufacturing plant for further inspections and pose a threat of safety to employees.

According to research performed by the Ponemon Institute and GlobalScape, the yearly cost of noncompliance can run a company about $14.8 million, while paying for up-to-date compliance is just $5.5 million.

Unfortunately, though, many companies are stuck manually tracking compliance across spreadsheets. This is time-consuming and error-prone. And it provides no insight when action needs to be taken, leaving you open to losing business and paying hefty fines.

Today’s more technologically advanced world has offered a solution: automated certification tracking.

Who Keeps Track?
Only 70% of firms try to rate how effective their compliance programs are. These companies already don’t feel confident in their certification training measures — but only about 7% to 18% of businesses are ready to digitize their operations.
Systems such as TalentGuard’s Certification Tracking software, however, track, manage, and report on employee training, professional development, and licenses while ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements based on the appropriate industry code. They can also provide and verify certification evidence to vendors and suppliers while giving status updates to all interested parties.

Companies across industries need to track certifications, and they need to do it quickly. Construction, for example, is one of the most highly regulated industries, and construction firms must consider everything from building codes to bonding requirements to union payroll requirements when they take on a new hire.

Consumer products are subject to the most penalties — PwC found that hundreds of products have been recalled over the past five years, costing businesses anywhere from $10 million to $30 million. And in aviation, if an airplane mechanic is working with an expired certification, all the passengers on the plane he worked on are at risk. The airline is now at fault, it will likely receive fines by the FAA, and its planes could all be grounded.

Implementing Software
Engineering, manufacturing, nursing, and information technology require certifications. And industries that have heavy machine operations, such as assembly line roles and employees in oil and gas or mining and metals, are all subject to compliance rules and regulations. If your company is within these industries, or one of the many other industries that need such certifications, you need to move away from manual tracking. Here’s how to implement an automated certification tracking system:

1. Assign responsibility. 
Tracking certifications does not always fall on HR to handle. Depending on the industry, sometimes it falls under safety and compliance or training departments. Once you’ve determined who is in charge of choosing the system, you’ll also have an idea of which teams will be responsible for ensuring employees have valid certifications and are in compliance.


2. Determine what solutions you need.
Those responsible parties will need to identify the goal that such a system will need to achieve. Once you know the goal, you can sift through the available software to determine which ones best meet that need.

In addition, if you want to do anything other than certification tracking — such as assigning certifications to development plans as part of an employee’s personalized career path — you need to understand whether the vendor you select can offer that as an option after serving your primary need of automating your certification tracking requirements. Your industry’s regulations will play a role in this. From there, it comes down to ease of use; don’t be persuaded by bells and whistles that won’t serve your needs.

3. Organize to ensure the process is moving forward. 
There will be some manual work involved to transition the certification requirements per employee in the system, but this will make the automated process much easier moving forward. Organization will be the key to this success. For example, you can group certifications by type — construction would have safety and equipment as two different groups. You can also organize certifications or employees by job roles to keep the transition smooth. 

Managers must be aware of the ranges when employees need to renew certifications. During the setup process, specific certifications can be assigned time-range dates for how long they are valid, and managers can set up notifications to be sent at 60 days prior, 30 days prior, one week before, etc.

4. Ease the transition for employees. 
Companies will need to use the system they select to assess whether this new process is beneficial to them. This change is meant to be easier and cost-effective, but there is always a transition period when new processes are learned.
Managers will need to communicate to their employees that there is a process change and that they have built the foundation for the employees to operate in. Employees are responsible for uploading their certifications within the automated system.

Companies that employ workers who need to stay up-to-date on certifications waste a lot of time, energy, and money on tracking logistics. Let technology ease some of the burden by automating the regulating process. With the four steps above, your company can be in a much better position to keep up with all of the moving pieces of ongoing certifications.

Linda Ginac is the chairman, president, and CEO of TalentGuard. Prior to TalentGuard, she founded a successful career development franchise, The Ginac Group, serving clients across the U.S. and Canada since 1999. Prior to this, Linda was vice president of product strategy at Cofiniti, where she was instrumental in pioneering Cofiniti’s global entry into collaborative financial planning using cloud-based technology and preparing the company for a successful exit.

Linda also served as marketing executive at pcOrder, where she collaborated with the team that led the company from a startup to a NASDAQ-listed public corporation. In prior leadership roles, Linda served as vice president of marketing at EPSIAA, where she led global expansion of the brand through acquisition by Fiserv; vice president of business development at Computer People; and numerous leadership roles at Digital Equipment Corporation.