Competencies

A competency can be a formal qualification, or skill or piece of knowledge. A license, or ‘ticket’ is a competency. Knowing how to perform a specific task or follow a procedure could also be a competency. For example:

Licensed Forklift Operator
Trade qualified Electrical Fitter
General Construction Induction White Card
SOP-11 Water Sampling
Processing Customer orders

Competencies can be acquired through formal training, on-the-job mentoring, or experience gained over time.

To manage competencies, you'll need to be a user in the "training_managers" permission group.

Which competencies should we track?

Work out which competencies are important to your business, i.e. they affect your product or service, your customer experience, impact safety, or are legal / regulatory requirements. Then add these competencies to Toolbox.

When you're starting out, just stick to your compliance related competencies and keep things simple.

Leave out the 'nice to know' things until later. You don't want to begin with 50 competencies for each of 50 people, and then have to upload 50 x 50 = 2500 training records (unless you really need to).

How do Competencies work in QSToolbox?

Competencies are linked to Jobs as required training. e.g.,

A Driver (job) must hold a Driver's Licence (competency).

When you assign the job to an employee, they pick up those competency requirements.e.g.,

Alex (employee) has the job of Driver. Alex is now required to have a Driver's Licence.

Competencies are also linked to Employees through Training records, and this is how thy meet their competency requirements. e.g.,

Alex holds a Driver's Licence issued on 11 May 2022 (Training Record).

Add a Competency

Choose "Competencies" and click on "Add competency" at the top right and fill in the details. Here's more details on how to add a competency

Edit a competency

Click on the competency name in the list of competencies and click the edit button at the top right.

View Active Employees with Current Records

When you view the competency you'll see a list of all the employees who have a valid training record (not expired). You can search the records to find someone you're looking for.

There's a couple of shortcut buttons available to a 'training_manager' user.

LIST RECORDS: goes to the Training records view to show records for this competency.
EXPIRE ALL: on confirmation, this will set the expiry date to yesterday for all the current records to invalidate them. It's used to force retraining, such as when a critical process changes and relevant employees need to be training on the updated procedure.

View Active Employees with a Training Gap

When you view the competency you'll see a list of all the employees who have a Job that requires this competency but don't have a valid Training record in QSToolbox.

There's a few shortcut buttons available to a 'training_manager' user.

ADD TASKS: add a task with matching users* selected as assignees, e.g., to read & acknowledge
ADD RECORDS: bulk create training records for all the listed employees
ADD EVENT: add an event to the Calendar in Toolbox with matching users* selected as attendees, e.g. a training event.

* Employees and Users are separate things. A training gap is identified for an Employee, but a task is assigned to a User, and an event attendee must be a User. QSToolbox matches between Employees and Users via the email address. If these functions aren't working as expected, check that the employee has an email address entered into QSToobox and it matches the email address of a user.