Depending on your sector of business, you may have extensive training to keep your employees at an acceptable skill level. Recurring training is sometimes mandatory when public safety and hazardous activities come into play. This adds to the planner’s burden of pre-scheduling training and making sure all employees are kept up to date with the recurring training or license before scheduling them. Training will also remove production capacity from the pool of employees.
Although it is seen as a constraint, training is a fixed cost to make sure the business stays productive. If training does not occur, then more production capacity will be lost in the near future when training will become no option because the employees will have lost their licenses to perform the appropriate activities. Planners sometimes cut corners short by canceling training to solve an immediate production coverage problem, but will in the end only cause a greater problem down the road. Scheduling training sometimes involves many groups and resources and therefore are difficult to schedule by themselves. An employee will have to sign up for the next class which may occur only months from now. Therefore, removing an employee from a planned training needs to be a calculated move.
In some industries, you also need to train new employees on the job and associate them with a skilled trainer. The planner therefore has to plan a new employee and a trainer to work at the same times and also count the employee’s effectiveness into account. Although there are 2 employees, they only produce as one employee. This association needs to be updated and clearly stated all the way to the point of working to schedule. The employee needs to know who the trainer will be and vice-versa.
Some industries will even schedule on the job testing where many instructors will observe an employee before granting them a license. These businesses have the additional challenge to keep their employees up to date using a trainer on a one-on-one basis, but also keep the trainer’s skill at that same level plus the skill of training in itself.
Although essential, training does remove a lot of capacity from a productivity perspective. All this training adds constraints to the planner’s ability to schedule efficiently.