Training the Employer Requires

Training the employer requires is working time. That is uncontroversial where it happens in a classroom during a shift, and it is just as true where it happens on a laptop at nine in the evening because there was no time during the day.

The workflow in “Training the Employer Requires” becomes more reliable when scheduled hours, actual time and later corrections can be distinguished. For teams exploring how employees cheat time trackers, how employees cheat time trackers can add operational time and project context, provided data collection is proportionate, permissions are limited and every important exception receives human review.

The second case is where the hours disappear. The learning platform records the time; the working time calculation never sees it; and the volume across a workforce is substantial.

For an independent reference relevant to “Training the Employer Requires”, consult the NIST Privacy Framework. Use it to test working-time definitions, recordkeeping, access, retention and exception handling against the organisation’s real process rather than treating one software report as conclusive.

What makes it required

That the employer requires it, by name or by consequence. A module that must be completed to continue doing the job is required, whether or not anybody used the word mandatory.

Training the person chooses to do for their own development, which the employer permits but does not require, is a different thing. The distinction is whether there is a consequence for not doing it, and most organisations can sort their catalogue into the two piles in an afternoon.

Why it ends up at home

Because the shift is full. E-learning is assigned with a deadline and no time allocated, the person's day is already accounted for, and the only slack available is their own evening.

This is a resourcing decision that nobody made deliberately. The training was costed at the licence fee and not at the hours, so the hours were never scheduled, so they come out of somewhere else.

The data is already there

Learning platforms record completion time, usually to the minute, because that is how they demonstrate compliance for the training itself.

So the organisation can produce, today, the total hours its workforce spent on required modules last year. That figure has never been asked for and it is usually large enough to change the conversation about how training is scheduled.

Sizing it

Export completions for a year with durations, filter to required modules, and total by person.

Fourteen modules a year at forty minutes each is over nine hours per person. Across a thousand people that is more than four full-time posts of working time that no rota, no budget and no limit calculation has ever accounted for.

The two honest responses

Schedule it: allocate the time within shifts, which costs cover and makes the real price of the training catalogue visible. This is the response that tends to shrink the catalogue, because once the hours are costed somebody asks whether all fourteen modules are necessary.

Or count it: capture the hours into the working time figure and accept that they push some people closer to limits. This is less satisfactory because it still leaves people doing the training in their own evenings.

Most organisations need both: count it now, schedule it over the next year.

Travel to training

Where training happens somewhere else, the journey is usually working time on the same basis as travel to a non-usual workplace, and for a day course at a venue two hours away that is a longer day than anybody planned.

This is worth checking specifically for induction and for safety courses, which tend to be centralised and therefore involve travel for everybody in the organisation at some point in their first month.

The audit nobody runs

List every module the organisation requires, who requires it, on what authority, how often it must be repeated, and how long it takes.

Five columns. Most organisations find that the list contains modules required by a policy that no longer exists, duplicates covering the same ground for different audiences, and refresher cycles shorter than anything requires. Removing a third of it is common, and it is a bigger reduction in hours than any scheduling change.

What to put in the figure first

Required modules completed outside rostered hours. That is the subset that is both uncounted and unambiguously working time, and the learning platform can produce it filtered by completion timestamp against the rota.

It is a smaller integration than the full picture and it captures the part that matters, which is the evening hours nobody has ever acknowledged.

The deadline that creates the evening

Most out-of-hours completion is driven by a date. A module assigned in March with a deadline at the end of the month, to people whose shifts are already full, will be done at home in the last week.

Staggering deadlines across the year and allocating time within shifts removes most of it. It is a scheduling change rather than a policy one, and it is usually within the gift of whoever administers the learning platform — who has never been told that the completion timestamps describe a working time problem.