Importance of Maintaining Training Attendance Sheets in IT Organizations

Training is perhaps the most sought after amenity for employees working in IT organizations. Apart from the financial compensation, employees look to better their skills, and there are two ways to achieve this.

The first is of course work experience. When a person is asked to work in a new environment, he is bound to pick up the new area within a couple of months if not more. The most preferred way is classroom training – employees would kill for it if the rules are flexed :).

Giving training to employees in one part of the jigsaw puzzle, while if you look at things from an organization perspective, they not only are obliged to train their employees but are required to keep certain artifacts in their possession to ensure that they kill quite a few birds with one stone.

First and foremost, organizations mandate in their policies that an employee must have certain number of training hours under their belts in a given financial year – 40 hours a year sounds fair. To keep track of these 40 hours, organizations will need to maintain a database of training attendance.

Most IT organizations opt for ISO20K for service management compliance and ISO27K1 for security compliance. These two standards mandate organizations to train resources on the trades of service management and security guidelines and policies. As evidence to training being conducted, auditors ask for training attendance sheets. It hence becomes one of the principal artifacts for complying with the above mentioned standards.

In project management, project team getting trained is either pre-requisite or is considered under the project plan. If it is a pre-requisite, either a training certificate or training attendance sheet will do. If training is a part of the project, it is mandatory for the project manager to maintain the attendance sheet.

If you have any further questions on this topic, do let me know.