Training Archives

Creating your ultimate workforce – improving recruitment decisions

Posted on: 11 June 2025

Staff turnover is an inevitability in any business. As is, hopefully, business growth. When a business expands, new recruits are needed to fulfil an expanding list of tasks. Pinpointing the skills and experience required, however, can be a challenge. It can make recruitment difficult for any organisation. So, how can you best tackle recruitment, conducting it seamlessly for the smooth running of your services?

Understanding is the vital ingredient. It’s one thing knowing that you need to bring people in, but it’s a different challenge being able to swiftly pinpoint the skills and experience required to best serve your business needs. Having a bird’s eye view of your entire workforce can help. When training, competency management and understanding of future tasks and scheduling are brought together within a single workforce management framework, it helps you in identifying skills gaps and making informed decisions in regards to your recruitment.

Knowledge driving recruitment

If you have a central system that holds all the information on your workforce, it makes the task of understanding the skills, experience and competencies available to you straightforward. You can easily run reports and gain vital insight. In industries such as construction, transport and healthcare, core competencies are vital in delivering frontline services. For example, if you have a low or dwindling number of staff appropriately qualified to administer injections, it gives you an opportunity to react before service delivery is impacted.

Now, this can of course be done internally via training programmes as we touched upon in our previous blog. The same holistic view of training and competencies across your organisation is vital in making informed recruitment decisions, too.

Where staff cannot be upskilled internally, it makes recruitment inevitable. Using a central system can make the task easier for management teams responsible for recruitment, by being able to identify specific skills and experience that are needed across the organisation. Recruitment isn’t just a numbers game and shouldn’t be left to chance.

How long will the recruitment process take?

Another crucial aspect is understanding how long the recruitment process will take. Managers will need to take time out from their usual tasks to conduct interviews; what’s the knock-on effect of this? There’s also a cost implication in terms of not having enough staff available and in terms of the shifting of resources to the recruitment process.

Diverting resources is obviously a big undertaking, so understanding the consequences upon your resources, time and budgets is fundamental. Having a central view of your workforce will again help in this regard, helping to map out your resources and their allocation.

Recruitment leading to training and competency management

Once the recruitment phase is completed and you have new staff signed up, what happens next? The first aspect is once again linked to your competency management efforts. If someone says they have certain qualifications, particularly in safety critical environments it is a good idea to check. Evidencing certificates and obtaining references can be completed by the new staff member, with the copies then stored against their record in your system. This means that you will have oversight of their skills, qualifications and experience for the duration of their time with you. This will help your scheduling teams in being able to appropriately assign tasks to them.

Once you’re satisfied that they are appropriately qualified, they will then need to be enrolled into your organisation and the teams with which they will be working. This process may include mandatory health and safety training for new starters. Assigning this and making sure it’s completed can be done centrally, with any result again being stored against their record. This can trigger alerts for when any refresher training might be required in future, too.

What happens next?

Most jobs have a probationary period, something that extends beyond safety critical work and helps to ensure that people are up to the job for which you have employed them for. Similarly, it enables employees the opportunity to leave with shorter notice if they decide the job isn’t for them.

Keeping track of this probationary period is crucial. Assessments and feedback of their work will help to make informed decisions on whether or not they have passed. Storing all of this information centrally helps to give your organisation a complete view of its workforce.

Once a new recruit is up and running, they will hopefully be in a position to fulfil their tasks in the way needed. Seeing them become a regular part of your workforce asap is beneficial to service delivery. This requires careful planning and oversight of your organisation.

What specific skills and experience does your organisation need? Who will be required to recruit? How much time will be needed? What processes are in place to get new starters up and running? All of these questions can be answered when you have a bird’s eye view of your entire workforce. By linking training and competency management, you can make more informed and accurate decisions.

CACI has recently published a whitepaper, Effective workforce management to improve outcomes across your business, which explores this topic in more detail. You can download your free copy here.

Why scheduling is vital to effective workforce management

Posted on: 22 May 2025

Scheduling is the glue that keeps organisations together. It provides clarity over tasks to be completed and helps management teams in looking back to see what has been achieved. Who performed what tasks and when? How did they do? In times of employee strain, when workforces are stretched, having an agile scheduling tool is vital for firms in keeping their projects and services running. Without a robust scheduling framework, organisations are at the mercy of guesswork and good fortune.

Why is scheduling so important?

Scheduling pervades every aspect of company life. At a basic level, the majority of working contracts outline expected hours along the lines of the 9-5 theme. From there, employees are expected to complete tasks in a timely fashion. Staying on top of individuals is easy enough, but what if you have an entire workforce to assign tasks to and track? In industries such as healthcare, transport and construction, project completion and service delivery are dependent upon the input of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of staff members.

In such organisations, a central administrative team needs to assign tasks to employees to ensure that projects and services can be delivered effectively and efficiently. It can be akin to moving chess pieces around a board, using different pieces in different ways to attack the tasks at hand. From time to time you also need to go on the defensive, when projects overrun, or services are disrupted.

Linking scheduling to other aspects of workforce management

To fill your tasks, an understanding of what each employee is competent in is vital. You can’t use a knight to do a bishop’s job, to labour the chess analogy. Manually researching who can step in to fill a role is a painstaking process. It’s also a waste of time, since with a robust scheduling system, it is something that can be done automatically.

Quickly filtering through employees and instantly understanding their training, competencies and experiences facilitates swift and efficient decision making. Further understanding of their existing schedule enables administrators to assign tasks within business rules and legally contractable hours.

By setting out schedules in advance, organisations can clearly communicate with their employees and enable them due oversight of their shifts and tasks. Within a centralised scheduling system, it is also possible to facilitate the swapping of schedules between staff members to provide flexibility.

Your business rules, your scheduling

Everything can be completed within the boundaries of your business rules. Each organisation has its own unique ways of working, so catering for these on a case-by-case basis is vital. This can also be true of individual departments within an organisation. For example, many contracts reward staff for longer service with the provision of extra annual leave. Holidays need to be factored in, as do the rules around when a certain number of employees can be off at any given moment.

Factoring in overtime and how that’s dealt with, in terms of overrunning projects, compensation and the impact it has on future shifts, also requires careful consideration. Considering these elements in an automated fashion facilitates not only swift decision making, but also fair and consistent decision making.

External and internal regulations also need to be factored into your scheduling process. Aspects such as fatigue management can easily get overlooked when there’s pressure on to finish projects and tasks, but ignoring them can be costly.

The cost of getting scheduling wrong

Renown Consultants Limited was fined £450,000 with £300,000 in costs in 2020 after being convicted under the Health and Safety at Work Act. The company had failed to ensure that two of its workers were sufficiently rested to travel home after a shift in 2013. The two employees were driving from Stevenage to Doncaster after a nightshift when the driver fell asleep, resulting in a collision which was fatal to both passengers.

Travel times to and from shifts that require safety intensive work to be conducted must be factored in. Clearly, travelling from Stevenage to Doncaster is a lengthy journey – 133 miles. Again, a robust scheduling solution can help factor in aspects such as distances and potential travel times. This can help to avoid unnecessary journeys and deploy staff more intelligently based upon their location.

This also helps in plotting out schedules for staff such as district nurses. In conducting care visits, it makes sense to reduce travel times between tasks, helping to improve efficiency and complete more visits in a single shift.

Plug your scheduling into your wider organisation

Scheduling is vital for every company. In managing a large workforce, it is even more important, especially where vital infrastructure and healthcare services are concerned. Having robust oversight of your scheduling links closely to your efforts to deliver services and projects, recruit new staff, train existing employees and keep on top of your competency management.

It also helps in monitoring and reporting on objectives and outcomes. If projects have overrun or performed well, having a holistic view of who managed and worked on them is vital in garnering understanding that can inform future tasks.

Fundamentally, however, scheduling is central to the very core activities of any business. Leaving it to chance, guesswork and human error is a risky process. The tools exist to enhance your scheduling, by equipping your administrative teams with the tools to help them make swift, informed and effective decisions. Without the need to manually trawl through records, it leaves them free to focus on exceptions and improvements, in turn helping to move your organisation forward.

CACI has recently published a whitepaper, Effective workforce management to improve outcomes across your business, which explores this topic in more detail. You can download your free copy here.

Effective workforce management – training and competency management

Posted on: 17 April 2023

Ongoing training and competency management efforts are vital for organisations in maintaining effective service delivery. Keeping staff competent, via mandatory ongoing training for their role, is often a regulatory issue. Offering staff opportunities to expand upon their core competencies makes the same process beneficial to the development of your workforce.

Whilst training and competency management are closely linked, there are some differences.

Training management

Certain training courses are mandatory in most professional environments. For example, offices require a number of trained first aiders and fire wardens. Such training needs refreshing every three years, so having staff with those competencies in the office requires them to be trained on an ongoing basis.

In more public facing and safety critical roles, ongoing mandatory training in aspects of health and safety is required. Not fulfilling these training obligations leaves firms at risk of staff carrying out their tasks improperly.

Keeping on top of these courses is vital. A central system helps firms to set reminders and book in mandatory courses for their employees. Such a system can also help to keep track of attendance, ensuring that courses have been attended and completed.

Using the same system, organisations can also make their training courses open to their employees for them to book onto when it suits them. This makes your training management more flexible and opens up training opportunities to employees who may find them interesting. By offering the opportunity to expand on their professional interests, training management can help with staff morale and career development.

If you can train and bolster the competencies of your existing workforce, it makes life easier if you need to move staff around tasks to keep project and service delivery on track during times of strain.

Running training courses also incurs an expense. It makes sense to monitor attendances and interest in certain courses, so that you can offer tailored and more relevant courses to your workforce. Where spaces are likely to be free in arranged courses, having robust oversight of this enables you to open course registration within your organisation, or even sell spaces to other industry firms, the employees of which also need to attend such a course.

Competency management

Competency management is closely, even inextricably, linked to training management. Where it differs in the first instance is in the recruitment of new employees. If an employee says they have the necessary qualifications to fulfil the role for which you are employing them, competency management is the simple act of ensuring that they are indeed appropriately qualified.

For example, if you’re employing someone to do a driving job, it’s prudent to check that they have a driving licence. Where competency management would link with training management in such a scenario would be if you need that employee to further their driving credentials at a point in the future. So, for example, you may need to enhance their competency and send them on an advanced driving course.

Ongoing training plays a crucial role in competency management, too. As mentioned above, in many industries ongoing training is mandatory. This keeps your workforce competent for the tasks that you need it to be competent for.

Where competency management extends this is by linking to performance. If a certain employee is involved in a certain number of similar incidents, it can be a good idea to try and find out why and assign them to an appropriate training course. This means that you are taking reasonable steps to provision for both employee and customer safety, whilst also keeping your services running smoothly.

Assessing staff competencies on an ongoing basis, therefore, is crucial. In the same way that you would schedule an employee, assessors need to be scheduled to staff members and teams to periodically check their work. On the rail network, for example, such assessments take the form of an assessor conducting a ride along with a train driver to check that they are carrying out their job appropriately.

If all is well, this can be logged instantly in a central system. Similarly, if errors are detected, these can be logged instantly, with any follow-up tasks, such as another assessment or the requirement for further training, being actioned straightaway. This helps to ensure that the competencies of your staff are covered, whilst linking directly to your training management for mandatory and remedial courses.

Maintaining a central database of your workforce and its competencies fundamentally helps you to ensure that your have the right people performing the right tasks. A robust competency management framework benefits your scheduling efforts, too, since your administrative teams responsible for scheduling can assign tasks with peace of mind that those employees being rostered are appropriately qualified and/or experienced for the role to which they are being assigned.

Furthermore, a central competency management system feeds into other areas of your organisation. In being able to swiftly and accurately assess the strengths and weaknesses of your workforce, you can make informed decisions in other areas such as recruitment.

Training management and competency management for your entire organisation

The benefits of having robust training and competency management across your organisation are clear. Fulfilling mandatory ongoing training obligations whilst at the same time opening up opportunities across your workforce to expand upon their competencies is hugely beneficial.

Keeping staff competent is one thing but offering career progression boosts morale and helps to keep staff working for your organisation rather than having to seek opportunities elsewhere.

Ultimately, your workforce is your point of project and service delivery. Maintaining and understanding the array of skills and experiences drives effective and efficient delivery. Plugging this into other areas of your business, such as scheduling, enables your organisation to be agile in the face of short-term changes and responsive in remedying medium and longer term issues which are more easily identified with a bird’s eye view of your workforce.

Getting your training and competency management frameworks to dovetail will help drive understanding of your workforce, which in turn will help effective and efficient deployment to projects and services.

CACI has recently published a whitepaper, Effective workforce management to improve outcomes across your business which explores this topic in more detail. You can download your free copy here.