Business Plans – Training Plans

The SDMS V IIP Training Planner for Windows allows you to develop and prepare overall training plans setting out what training courses, workshops, skills, qualifications and competencies will support the achievement of your business strategy or plan.  It allows you, therefore, to integrate overall training planning into your processes and procedures for day-to-day administration and delivery of training.  Automatic mapping of training delivered, types of training and benefits of training against plans provides immediate information to ensure that your employee training is monitored and evaluated against the business requirements.

 Staff Development and Training Management

SDMS V Staff Development for Windows: Version 5 supports full course management and administration.  Data is collected at the proposal, planning, application, and approval or nomination stages.  Course planning and scheduling, course advertising, enrolments and attendance are all supported.  If required qualifications and competencies resulting from successful participation in the course can be held together with provider and trainer details.  Course aims and objectives programme and agenda together with course materials can be recorded reducing duplicated effort often experienced in training delivery.  It provides a means of fully incorporating training and development into overall business planning, as well as for organising and delivering all forms of training and development from traditional courses to open learning.  And of course date clashes for trainers, events and delegates is standard to help with the practicalities of planning and scheduling.  With SDMS V e‑Training for Web Access this can be delivered via the web browser.

 Planning Methodologies

The SDMS V IIP Training Planner incorporates in the SDMS V product range the ability to design training plans using a variety of methodologies, with facilities to monitor and evaluate them against the training delivered.  Whether you see this planning as a top down directive process or a bottom up consultative process or a combination of both the software provides tools to enable you to implement your particular model of planning.

 Top Down and Bottom Up

For those organisations that wish to promote a corporate perspective, training plans can be defined which set out the training required to satisfy well-defined business objectives.  The elements of the training plan may consist of any combination of broad training areas, prescribed topics, or programmes of training activities.  Within the plan qualifications required or specific employee competencies can be described.  In turn, each element of the training plan can be applied to departments, types of staff, particular posts or named individuals.

Alternatively, training plans can be set out at department level, either as an alternative to overall corporate planning, or in combination with it.  This allows some elements of the departmental plan to be derived from corporate strategies and others left to departmental determination.  Departmental training requirements can be entered as a starting point for corporate planning, then aggregated (and possibly revised) to construct the corporate plan.  This flexibility enables the SDMS V IIP Training Planner for Windows to engage with the 'real world' situation which training managers face, where the training they must deliver is a composite of many sources and influences, but must still be evaluated against a coherent strategy.

 Employee Survey, Needs and Appraisal

Where the focus of training planning is the individual, employee training needs profiles can be defined and aggregated into departmental and corporate training plans.  The results of employee training needs surveys, appraisal or performance review meetings, job or task analyses and line manager nominations (often instigated as a result of working towards IIP) can all be recorded for each individual employee.  As with departmental plans, these can be summed first to departmental and then corporate level.  Where training plans result from external funding and grant arrangements, these financial processes may be built into the plan.

 General versus Detailed

The software allows the contents of such plans to be defined with widely different degrees of specificity, ranging from the most sketchy, schematic or general form to the highest degree of detail.  Training plans are definable by subject area (e.g. Management Development), specific topics (e.g. 'strategic decision making' within Management Development), the level of training and its urgency or priority to the organisation.  Each element of your plan can be assigned a weighting relative to other elements.  A general description of the training as well as its duration, methods of delivery and any preferred providers can all be entered.  Here, required elements of the plan can be defined down to the level of individual competencies, qualifications and NVQs. Compulsory and statutory requirements which give rise to recurrent training can also be included and is automated to ensure regular updates happen.  Types of staff, occupants of particular posts or named individuals can all be given specified training needs by a simple yet highly effective form of global updating, which is an inherent part of the software.  The number of employees requiring training in specific subjects or competencies can also be defined.

 Planning and Finances

Having defined the quantitative and qualitative elements of the plan, the financial implications of the plan can also be addressed.  Elements of the plan can be assigned to appropriate budgets and then costed.  For example, your current plan may require all supervisors to be trained in "counselling staff following periods of sickness of more than 5 days, at introductory level" and that this is judged to be an urgent business requirement.  It is to be funded from the departmental budget to which the supervisor belongs and the expected costings include; Trainer Fees £450, Subsistence £50, Design of Course £200, Room Hire at the company training centre £100 and follow-up on-the-job evaluation £1500.  The system then takes on the task of extrapolating these figures to this element of the plan.  Plans may be created in a working file, allowing the final plan to be arrived at through a process of successive approximations.  Introductory and explanatory text can be inserted into the plan and the whole plan can be printed and published directly from the software.

 EDP Planner for LEAs

The SDMS V ED Planner (Educational Development Planner) Module is a special edition of the IIP Planner designed for LEAs.  It allows LEAs to integrate overall educational development plans into the processes and procedures for day-to-day administration of training and adviser support provided to schools and other partners.  With automatic mapping of training and support delivered, types of training and benefits of training against educational development plans it provides immediate information to support the evaluation of services provided to schools.