If You’re Not Tracking Your Employees’ Training, You Should Be

Keeping records of how your employees have been trained can protect you from big headaches in the future.

If you’re reading this, you’re more than likely a responsible store manager. You want what’s best for your store, your customers and your employees. You make sure to provide the best training possible – including We Card’s award-winning interactive training courses – so they know both what to expect and how to react to most any difficult situation at the register.

Great work! But there is still one crucial step you need to take: Keeping records of all of your training.

Why is keeping records important? Let’s talk about it.

Employee Evaluation
Want to compare an employee’s compliance pre- and post-training to see their progression? Training records are a great way to track performance so you can make better, more informed personnel decisions.

Schedule Re-Training
Maybe you’ve noticed an employee struggling lately with compliance. Having training records on file allows you to know at a glance which employees have gone through specific training courses and when. This can help you determine if and when refresher training is needed to re-sharpen their skills.

Protection Against Violations
In the unfortunate event that your location receives a compliance violation, you can bring your training records to court to demonstrate your good faith effort in training your employees and, perhaps, receive a reduced fine or penalty because of your demonstrated responsible retailing efforts.

The FDA recommends keeping training records “for 4 years in order to be able to provide evidence of a training program during the 48-month time period covered by the civil money penalty schedules in section 103(q)(2)(A) of the Tobacco Control Act.”

We Card’s eLearning Center makes tracking employee training records a cinch. You can easily view which of your employees have completed which courses and download or print those results for your own records.

Along with your training records, you need a written Company Policy on Tobacco & Vaping Product Sales Policy.  We have a Word document template download for you in our Resource Center to use to create a policy or update your existing one.  Have employees read & sign the Acknowledgement section of the policy. Here’s a few more reasons why you should have a policy for your company.

Learn more about employee training and other critical resources at store.wecard.org.