Training administrators are some of the hardest working members of a learning and development (L&D) team and often don’t receive a lot of credit for keeping training activities on track and within budget. Here are the top six training administrator pet peeves and what training administrators can do to avoid such annoying situations.

1. Since when do I have five bosses?

Meet Angela. She’s your friendly, hard-working, reliable training administrator. Now that she has settled down at her desk 15 minutes later than planned because someone left the coffee pot empty this Monday morning, she opens her email to find the floodgates have opened. There are 40 new messages, each requesting different classroom training sessions, from sales, HR and the technical teams. When demands are handed down and email requests are forwarded to a training administrator, it can feel like having five different bosses.

Tip: Create priority labels or categories for important emails, and label them as they come in. Prioritize requests from top priority to low priority.

2. Finding the important information is a scavenger hunt.

For a training administrator, resource allocation starts with knowing the when, where and what of a training program. It means having quick and easy access to the most vital information. Reading how excited everyone is about the new company logo or Doughnut Thursday doesn’t matter as much as how many people are invited to the training session and what logistics are needed.

Tip: Create a training request template for your stakeholders to use that focuses on the key questions: the who, what, when and where of the training program.

3. Would you like to save your changes before closing this document?

During a busy day, training administrators are hard at work resolving scheduling conflicts and planning new sessions. One training administrator might move an instructor here, shorten a schedule there and so on. Angela might move the sales training to a different date right before leaving for lunch – but forget to save those changes. That means when another training administrator checks the schedule a few hours later and continues adjusting sessions, he or she isn’t working with the latest version. In short, it’s a mess. When there isn’t an easy way to share administrative documents, efficiency is lost.

Tip: Establish ground rules for before, during and after the planning process with your fellow training administrators. Update relevant team members about any changes or updates.

4. Help! I need another desk/chair/computer in one of my classrooms!

Receiving a panicked phone call about the projector that won’t turn on is one of many fires training administrators extinguish. No matter how thoroughly planned a session is, there’s always a chance for something to go wrong. Communication and problem-solving are a huge part of the job. When something is left off the to-do lists, it becomes a problem.

Tip: Consolidate to-do lists for consistency, and share them with the entire training management team. Prepare standard checklists that ensure the essentials are completed.

5. Human Versus Machine: Training Administrator Versus Spreadsheets

Part of Angela’s job is to track data and generate reports such as attendance sheets, schedules and budgets. She’s great at multitasking and keeping her records pristine, but manually inserting numbers into massive Excel sheets takes time. It’s easy to forget that someone who is well organized and efficient is still not a robot. Humans can’t compute or filter large data sets as well as machines can, and training administrators aren’t machines.

Tip: Look at past reports and note the data that is consistently needed. Develop the habit of tracking those numbers ahead of time so you’re better prepared.

6. When You Need a Translator for Training Administration

When companies adopt global training programs, it means training administrators must learn one or two – or 10 – new vocabularies. Multiple countries means multiple currencies and government regulations. While it’s great for companies to expand into a global space, it also complicates training delivery needs.

Tip: Do some research of your own to understand government regulations and requirements as early as possible to set yourself up for success. Consider investing in a system that automates currency conversions.

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