Whether you work in IT, the food industry, or retail, employee certifications are critical for remaining compliant with regulations, and they're an important part of delivering the best possible service to customers.
Most companies track their employee certifications manually, but this approach is prone to human error and sure to lead to lapses. Not keeping up with employee certifications can lead to fines, recalls, or, worse, shutdowns. There are a few steps you can take to avoid those negative outcomes and eliminate the issue of lapsed certifications altogether.
1. Evaluate Your Current Status
Begin by looking over your records and determining what preventative measures are most important. How many certifications are required for each role? How many employees do you have in total? This knowledge will reveal how severe your certification problems are, and gathering this data will also be helpful in the event you are audited, either by an internal party or an external one.
Failure to comply with legal requirements can lead to a number of outcomes — none of which are good for business. In a best-case scenario, businesses face fines. Most often, they cannot operate until they prove they’ve provided proper certifications to all employees whose jobs require it. Research by the Ponemon Institute and Globalscape revealed that the yearly cost of noncompliance can be as high as $14.8 million, but the cost of maintaining up-to-date compliance is just $5.5 million. In addition to fines, even a temporary shutdown results in losses of productivity and revenue.
There’s also the concern that without the paperwork that proves proper training and certification, you might be host to an unsafe working environment. These regulations exist to protect workers and consumers alike.
2. Make the Switch to Automatic Tracking
As with most daunting tasks concerning large amounts of complex information, most companies turn to a computer spreadsheet to manage certifications. Manually tracking certifications requires intensely attentive and accurate assessments of regulations and each relevant employee's status. For instance, each certification has a different start date that depends on when an employee begins a job.
While a well-made spreadsheet can help you organize information in an easy-to-read presentation, there’s only so much a spreadsheet can do. It cannot, for example, correct for human error by double-checking the data a person enters. Nor can it send you alerts about upcoming deadlines or changes in regulations.
Laws and standards are frequently changed, not only in terms of what knowledge is required to perform a job, but also in terms of who needs proof of such knowledge, how employees should provide that proof, and how often said proof must be updated. Software can make these updates automatically and send a notification so changes do not go unnoticed. These alerts make automatic tracking proactive, while manual tracking is reactive, causing you to scramble to catch up when errors occur.
Ensuring legality is too significant to risk missing a deadline. Updating your tracking to an automated process is the fastest way to improve compliance and demonstrate that your company is moving in the right direction and is not stuck in old ways.
3. Plan for New Hires
Determining certification needs is especially critical if you have plans in place for growth. No workforce stays the same forever, even at a small company. So as soon as you’ve established a reliable automatic tracking system, get planning for potential growth and new hires.
Start by determining what short-term hires are needed and what hires will occur down the line. Next, make sure you have a firm grasp on what certifications are required for each role. Once that total is understood, review how often certifications renew and the approximate time when that starting point begins. Make a plan for onboarding new employees in a way that addresses certification needs.
4. Focus on Legality, Not Competence
One reason companies often downplay the importance of official certification is because it isn’t always needed in order to prove competence. A worker might have done a job for 20 years, during which time certification expired. The knowledge still remains, but the company can’t prove it on paper. If you drive a car with an expired license, you will have to pay a fine if you get pulled over even though you still know how to drive a car. Managers must focus on legality, not just competence.
In highly regulated industries, manually tracking who can legally drive a forklift or what each union payroll requirement entails is practically a lost cause. Mistakes are bound to happen without the help of automatic tracking.
Ensuring your employees maintain proper certification might feel like a hassle, but these regulations exist to maintain the highest possible level of safety for your employees, consumers, and your business. The above steps provide an approach to managing certifications, giving you peace of mind that your operations are safe and legal.
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.
