Over the past few months, the technical team at SkillGate has been working on enhancements to the SkillGate Classroom Booking System adding a series of advanced functions. Each issue, in itself, may not be critical for your organisation. However, we thought you might be interested in a summary of the new power at your fingertips.

Most of the issues relate to the way Classroom Booking works in the ‘Traffic Light’ Compliance Management System.

As a reminder, Traffic Light allows you to make any type of training intervention mandatory, including face to face training, elearning and sign-off sessions. You can include rollovers, mazes updates and progress-controlled learning. And it will auto enrol training for users based on job role or other specification.

The important point is that it runs automatically, leading to very high completion ratios (typically over 90%). It can be managed manually or via APIs or data feeds.

The Classroom updates we have added recently include:

1. We have added new features to Classroom version 3 that allow administrators to manage detailed trainer and venue information. Specifically, this offers a series of advantages:

• It will not allow (or warn of) duplicate bookings for venue or trainer.
• It will warn if the venue selected is too small for the max class size anticipated.
• It allows trainers to view their personal diary and set absence, holiday or other information.
• It allows administrators to manage absences.
• There is a new report that will detail trainer’s daily activity.
• There is a new diary format that allows courses to be moved via drag and drop.
• It highlights when a course needs to be marked as archived/completed.

Classroom courses set up using Classroom version 2 will still work in version 3.

2. If a user is auto-instructed to attend a course for which there are no future dates scheduled – or all courses are full – a new system identifies and lists these users against the course required and offers the option to re-register them if, and when, course places become available.

Note: this is not the same as waiting lists where available dates may be unsuitable to the user.

3. Sometimes the Traffic Light system will require a user to complete a course that they have already attended. This can happen when a course is listed in the Library (i.e. a user may have already booked themselves) and then added to the Traffic Light system.

The system now lists last date attended against the manual registration process thus giving administrators the option. For automated data imports it provides a report on the dashboard.

4. It is essential that, post course, delegates are marked as ‘attended’ or ‘no shows’ or ’cancelled’. Without this information, the compliance rollover system cannot function properly and reports are misleading. Sometimes, however, it is simply not possible for administrators to know about attendance.

To solve this, administrators can set attendance to ‘Attended?’. Attended? Will appear on the classroom reports. This feature automatically completes courses after a specified period once the course has completed if attendance is otherwise unmarked.

5. As part of the Capacity system, administrators can reserve places for anticipated demand and allocate delegates prior to booking.

6. We have added a new Integrity Report that double checks to see that advanced Classroom programme formats are working smoothly for all users.

If you would like to learn more about the latest upgrade to SkillGate’s Classroom Booking System, would like to set up a demo, or have any other developments you would like to suggest, please get in touch.