One of the most challenging jobs for training departments is gearing up for new store openings. It’s a frenetic, fast-paced time that can challenge even the most organized trainers. A comprehensive training plan is required to ensure that the entire crew is up-to-speed and ready to represent your brand, perform their skill positions effectively, and provide excellent service to your guests. It’s a condensed period of intense, concentrated training activity that requires detailed coordination to manage all of the moving parts.

And although it’s one of the most exciting times in a hospitality business, tracking all of that training activity can be a very daunting task. New store trainers are often responsible for guiding employees through their learning programs and signing off on each learner as they are certified in their positions. Oftentimes, training for new store openings is done with the whole group at once, or multiple smaller groups for skill position training, and it’s very easy to lose track of who has received what training during the weeks before the grand opening. Your learning management system can be a great help in tracking both online and offline learning activity, but it does take some effort to ensure that everyone is given proper credit for the flurry of training activity that occurs, and especially for training done in a group.

Give Credit Feature Background

DiscoverLink Talent, our learning management system for the hospitality industry, already had Give Credit functionality, which allows administrators or managers to provide credit to a learner for training activities, bypassing the need for the learner to have to physically complete all of the content online. This can be especially useful when training a person with past experience – you can “comp” them out of content they already have learned elsewhere. Or, if an on-the-job trainer determines that a learner has already mastered a skill and requires no further training in a specific competency, this feature can be used to advance the learner through the program more quickly.

New Group Credit Enhancement

Now, with the latest release of DiscoverLink Talent, administration and tracking of group training is easier than ever. The new release adds three important extensions to the Give Credit feature that are especially useful for tracking group training:

1. The new Group Training Credit feature lets you give credit for individual content items or a whole learning program to a group of learners or across an entire store. This makes it easy to give credit for group training activities, and can be especially useful for new store openings, limited time offers or other special training events. Rather than having to give credit to each individual learner one at a time, administrators and managers can now apply credit for a course or learning program to the whole group with one simple action. The time savings from this is invaluable, especially during busy times like new store openings.
2. An Effective Date can now be added to indicate a specific date on which the credit should take effect, and it can apply to individual learners, groups or the whole store. You can select any date in the past, so if you are too busy to apply credit during a new store opening, for example, you can easily do it later but apply the actual date the training occurred. This is useful to maintain the proper sequence of learning activities in history and reports, especially when recurring training or date-sensitive compliance training is involved.
3. Comments can now be added when giving credit, providing you with the ability to explain the reason for the action. This allows you to add information about group training activities or notes detailing why credit was given. Comments appear in the learner’s history.

Make New Store Openings Easier

With these additional capabilities of the Give Credit feature in DiscoverLink Talent, navigating the craziness of new store openings is a little easier. With the new abilities to apply group training credit, set effective dates and add comments, you can rest assured that all of the training programs you worked so hard to put together are properly applied to the whole team. And that’s one less thing you need to worry about on opening day.