Employee, and especially bus driver, training is the foundation of the constant work that school districts do to not only be as safe as possible while transporting precious cargo, but also compliant with constantly changing state and federal requirements.
Keeping up to date on employee training hours can be a difficult, but crucial task. At best, mistakes can make the difference between being fully staffed for your daily routes and having to scramble for a substitute when you realize a driver’s credentials have expired. At worst, they can lead to legal concerns or worse.
While date-based certification tracking has been incorporated into transportation management software for years, Tyler Technologies recently announced a new, expanded take on training management that will help make training tracking easier, especially in states like California where strict reporting regulations lead to significant time spent managing records.
Recently announced at the Bus Technology Summit hosted by School Transportation News, this new training solution allows districts to truly customize and individualize tracking and reports, ensuring that administrators can easily manage the entry and pulling of data, and see individual employees’ training status at a glance. This new system is fully integrated with both the Traversa and Versatrans solutions from Tyler Technologies.
“We are always thinking of our clients’ needs first,” said Tyler Technologies Vice President and General Manager Ted Thien. “Training management can be a long and arduous task for a transportation director, and we saw an opportunity to streamline this with a new solution, featuring true integration with a complete transportation management software suite.”
With this new training functionality, the following and more is possible:
Event Types
The most common types of training — behind-the-wheel, in-service, and classroom — can all be easily managed in the training module, but there’s enough customization for users to add any custom or unique training types used at their operation. They can also track if a vehicle is needed for the training event, reserve the vehicle(s), and take them out of the fleet rotation for that period of time.
Instructor Tracking
No matter who is executing the training, users of this new solution can track it. Internal instructors among the employee base are automatically listed, but the built-in customization means users can always add an external instructor. Additionally, they can specify which employees are authorized to instruct based on your event types.
Training Locations
If a training is happening on-campus, within the bus garage, or any place that already exists in the software, it will be pre-populated in the Locations list. If the training is happening off-site, that’s not a problem either. This is another opportunity to include custom fields. Custom or off-site locations will be saved within the system in case users need them again later.
Training Events
With event type, instructor, and location ready to go, users can pull all the info together into one record. They can take attendance, track the length of the event, and mark the status (e.g. Scheduled, Complete, or Canceled), and also copy a training event to use for a future time.
Employee Records
Because of complete integration with either the Traversa or Versatrans management solutions, users of this training module can easily link training events to individual employee records. This means no double-entry or separate systems, and individual training records are available at a glance.
Reporting
This solution offers intuitive, robust reporting for the most common training needs, meaning that it’s not just easy to enter information into the system, it’s also easy to pull it back out to meet the needs of local, state, or federal requirements.
Tyler Technologies invites districts interested in learning more about this new system to contact them for more information. Links and information can be found at tylertech.com/stn.
