Tracking Employee Training Records

rednut00

Hi Folks,

I work for a small construction company and have been tasked with finding a better way of detailing/ keeping track of our Employee training records.

We currently use Excel for this but it becomes messy as we have a fairly transient staffing situation where trades/ people are brought in on a temporary basis when required.

Does anyone know of a better free system. I have seen databases set up which look pretty good but i am unfamiliar with how exactly to compile one. Each employee can have multiple items of training with expiry dates.

What we need:
Employee Name,
Training received and expiry date,
Ability to filter employees with certain items of training.
Ability to filter to see wat training will expire in the next 30/90/120 days
Ability to flag / notification of pending expiry of training,
If Possible - Ability of attaching a pdf file of the training certificate / Card


Any help would be very much appreciated.

TrustedApple

microsoft access is what you are looking for.

You can set up tables and then enter records into there tables and you can make quarys and look up say name and days of training left and so on.

It could take a while to set up but it is fantastic once up and running.

Wheety

I second Access. It needs to be set up correctly at the beginning. You may need to do a short course on relational databases. The basics are that everything should be only in the table once, where reasonable. So you'd have an employee table, a course table, maybe a training company table and many more once you sit down to design it.

Then the main table would be the training table. This (through links to the other tables) would have your employees, the course name, company, dates etc.

Edit to say: I say Access only if there's no budget to have something built/bought. If you have a budget, I'm sure you could buy an off the shelf tracker which could do all of this.

rednut00

Thanks guys,

As notes earlier i have seen databases that would be perfect but i am unfamiliar with how exactly to set one up.

Can eaither of you point me in a direction to a good tutorial / youtube video that could guide / walk me through this. I opened Access earlier but am oblivious as to where to start.

@Wheety
I have no budget for this at all, just a day or two to try and sort it out.

Thanks again.

Wheety

Is this for your own records or something for the company? I'm busy with college at the moment or I would knock something together for you.

Access itself is not too difficult once you've had a bit of training but to save possible data corruption in future or even just to make it easier to make changes, the database would need to be properly designed.

rednut00

Its for the Company.

I found a guide to Access that seems to be what i am looking for and i am trying to work my way through it.

Ill let you know how i get on.

Wheety

If you have any question about designing the database, just ask.

As said above, you should try and separate unrelated information. Every table should start with an ID. So your employee table could be

EmpID
EmpName
Email
Phone

And anything else you need to keep about just the employee.

Then you could have a course table.

CourseID
CourseName
CompanyID
etc.

This should only have information about the course. You wouldn't include the company name in the course table, unless each company only supplied one course. The ID would link back your company table so you don't need to include the company name for every course they supply.

Company table would have the company details. There is no need to include any course info here as they're linked through the course table.

Finally your EmpTraining table could be

EmpTrainingID
EmpID
CourseID
StartDate
EndDate
Completed
Cost

The IDs are int(number) type so the main table will be quite small and should be efficient. I don't know the exact info you need but hopefully that gives you an idea. Don't have any spaces in your table or field names. It'll just save any future headaches if you move this to any other database.

Try to include every piece of info at the beginning that you think you'll need but if you find the info is repeating, then it should really be in its own table.

Then you just need to learn about queries and reports