Scott County, MN: a compliance training success story
Introduction
Scott County was attracted to TrainingToday’s intuitive LMS and award-winning courses. The training content isn’t just engaging and interactive, it’s backed by seasoned industry experts with a proven track record. By combining their decades of experience and expertise with innovative training best practices, they create content that is simultaneously engaging, concise, and regularly updated to meet changing regulations.
“Our Editorial team is comprised of employment law or EHS subject matter experts whose primary responsibilities include conducting legislative and regulatory research and creating or updating compliance information across our various platforms. These editors are also the authors of our Training Today courses, so clients can provide our training with absolute confidence that the content is accurate, clear, and up to date.”
- Chris Ceplenski, Senior Manager of Content at BLR
Background
Scott County, Minnesota, is a county located southwest of Minneapolis with a population of 150,928. Since 1853, Scott County has provided traffic safety, health and human services, law enforcement, and environmental protection to its citizens through its public services.
Scott County by the numbers
- Founded 1853
- 642 employees
- 270 learners
- $57.6 million in revenue
Meet Kevin Nelson
Kevin’s professional journey includes 6 years as a sergeant and communications specialist in the U.S. Marine Corps before assuming roles within the Scott County Sheriff’s Office. With a tenure spanning from 1985 to 2018 as a correctional supervisor, Kevin transitioned to his current position as safety programs coordinator. In his current role, he manages training programs for various departments within Scott County, drawing on his diverse background to implement safety training and drive efficiency.
Challenges
After decades of relying on outdated PowerPoints and antiquated training videos with no formal learning management system (LMS), Scott County needed to make a change. When Kevin started in his role as safety programs coordinator, he was on a mission to convince leadership that they needed to modernize Scott County’s training with engaging content and an LMS.
Kevin and his team faced the challenge of delivering, monitoring, and documenting training across four distinct departments: the sheriff’s office, transportation services, health and human services, and planning and resource management. Each department had unique training requirements, including precise reporting to meet compliance with regulatory standards.
Some of these departments required highly specialized training that Scott County had to produce in-house, such as Hoist Training. This underscored the need for a comprehensive content provider offering diverse courses, the ability to integrate custom content, and an LMS capable of assigning, tracking, and reporting progress tailored to individual departmental and job-specific learning paths.
Key challenges
- Assign learning paths based on job title or department
- Create and integrate custom content into its LMS
- Automated tracking and reporting
- Auto-assignment of courses for employees across departments
- Content libraries with a wide breadth of courses for each department
After years of worrying about the accuracy of its records and spending countless hours manually tracking and reporting, it decided to invest in a combined LMS and content provider solution.
Vetting
Kevin vetted several vendors while searching for a solution, considering factors like employee engagement, LMS features, content offerings, and price point. After months of research and comparisons, he was torn between TrainingToday® and JJ Keller.
Ultimately, his team went with TrainingToday due to both the LMS capabilities and its extensive course libraries. The LMS offered superior supervisor communication and administrative capabilities, while the content libraries provided training for different types of safety, like general workplace safety, battery safety, hazardous waste safety, and healthcare safety.
Solution
Kevin and his team went from having no formal LMS to implementing TrainingToday, which seemed like a daunting task. Luckily for Kevin, TrainingToday’s dedicated support team walked them through a seamless implementation and training so they could hit the ground running. After the implementation phase, Scott County observed a notable shift in the effectiveness of its training programs.
Employees not only found the modernized content engaging but also appreciated the diverse range of instructors, adding a fresh perspective to their learning experience.
“Those who take the training say they really enjoy the courses, and the managers like that they can see which trainings are being completed by which employees.”
- Kevin Nelson, Safety Programs Coordinator
With four unique departments that each has its own training requirements, TrainingToday made it easy to assign, track, and report training. TrainingToday also allowed managers to create custom learning paths for their departments, ensuring their employees received relevant training.
Managers also appreciated the ability to search for course completion based on job titles and send notifications to learners with overdue training. Lastly, TrainingToday gave Kevin and his team peace of mind by providing accurate, set-and-forget reporting. After years of worrying about potential Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) violations for inaccurate records, they were confident their training requirements were fulfilled.
Moving forward
Scott County is looking to develop more custom content for its learners and is excited to add these courses into its learning paths. Currently, some of these trainings happen outside of TrainingToday, making them a sticking point when it comes to tracking. After it has its custom content built out, it will operate entirely in TrainingToday and will have further streamlined tracking and reporting.
Interested in seeing the same success? Visit our training resources page to learn how TrainingToday can optimize your training.
