“L&D Hacks” is an article series sharing tips, tricks, shortcuts and best practices that have made busy learning and development (L&D) professionals’ work a little easier.
Key Takeaways
- Use an intake form to standardize training requests. Collect frequently requested information upfront to reduce back-and-forth emails, simplify registration and keep all relevant details organized in one place.
- Use conditional questions to personalize the intake experience. Microsoft Forms can display relevant questions based on previous responses, helping you collect necessary information without overwhelming users with unnecessary fields.
- Automate repetitive steps with Microsoft Power Automate. Approval workflows can automatically notify approvers, capture decisions and route request details back to training managers, reducing manual follow-up and email tracking.
- Start small when automating L&D processes. Focus on repetitive, predictable tasks and automate one or two steps first, particularly when a process involves routine notifications, information collection or approvals.
Email is a great tool for communication, but not so much for managing ad-hoc training requests. If you’re responsible for memberships or course registrations that happen outside your learning management system (LMS), creating a standardized intake form may help streamline the process.
Many certification providers require quite a bit of information just to register someone for training. Tracking down that information can be frustrating, especially when a course is filling up and you need to move quickly. Or maybe you’re helping someone register for training and don’t want to fill their inbox with multiple questions just to collect the information you need.
In some cases, it can take multiple back-and-forth emails just to sign someone up for a class. You send an email asking for a link to the course, only to realize after receiving a response that you also need the charge code and login credentials for the organization. Then you discover that the training request was never approved. Before long, what should be a simple registration has turned into a lengthy email exchange, leaving you with multiple threads to track by the time you’ve collected all the necessary information.
An intake form can help you collect everything you need from the start. And you probably already have the software you need to automate part of the process.
Start With Questions You Already Ask
Microsoft Forms is a great tool for creating simple intake forms, and you can use Microsoft Power Automate to determine what happens after the form is submitted.
You don’t need an overly complicated system to clean up this process. Start by thinking about the questions you typically track down before you can process a training request. Are there questions you find yourself asking over and over? Those are the questions that belong on your form.
Next, determine which questions should be required and which can be optional. Here are some questions you may want to include:
- First and last name
- Department
- Are you seeking assistance with a certification or membership renewal?
- Are you requesting assistance for yourself or someone else?
- If you selected “someone else,” please provide their first and last name.
- What training or membership are you requesting?
- What is the reason for the training or membership?
- What is the total cost of the training or membership?
- Has your direct supervisor approved the request?
- What is the applicable charge code?
- What organizational login credentials are needed to complete the registration?
The questions above may not be necessary for every organization. The goal is to identify the information you regularly find yourself asking for and include it directly in the request.
Microsoft Forms also allows you to create “conditional questions,” which are questions or sets of questions that appear based on a user’s previous answers. This can keep the form from becoming overwhelming by showing only the questions that are relevant to each person’s situation. The goal isn’t to collect as much information as possible, but to collect the right information for the right circumstance.
What Happens After the Form Is Submitted?
Now, let’s consider the best part of this process — automating the request. One of the questions on your form should be to enter the email address of the person who needs to approve the training. From there, you can use Microsoft Power Automate to set up an approval workflow.
For example: The form is submitted à the approver receives a notification à the approver approves or rejects the request à the training manager receives the decision and request information à registration can be completed.
The approver receives a notification where they can approve or decline the training request. Once they submit their response, the result and information you preselect can be automatically routed back to you. This means you aren’t manually sending approval request emails and tracking down registration information in multiple email threads. All request details can be found within your Microsoft Form.
If you’ve never used Microsoft Power Automate before, there are many tutorials online to help you get started. I found it helpful to build my form first and have a clear understanding of which processes I wanted to automate.
This hack doesn’t involve creating an overly complex system but allows you to save time by collecting all the information you need up front and letting the tools you have handle repetitive work.
How Do You Know What to Automate?
It can be tempting to automate everything once you have a successful workflow in place. But adding too many steps can make the process overly complicated, and then if an automation were to fail, it’s harder to assess where it went wrong.
When thinking about automation, determine whether the work is repetitive, time-consuming and predictable. Consider these questions:
- Is this a task I complete often?
- Do the steps for this process remain relatively the same?
- Am I collecting the same information over and over?
- Is there a clear action or decision that should happen in relation to this task?
- Does this process involve sending routine notifications or reminders?
If you answered “yes” to one or more of the above questions, the process may benefit from automation. For example, if a training request needs some type of supervisor approval every time, that’s a predictable and repetitive process that could be built into your workflow. If the process is situationally dependent or requires more judgment, automation may not be a fit.
Other instances in which automation may not be a fit include:
- Tasks that involve sensitive information or conversations
- Tasks where the consequences of incorrect action are significant
- Tasks with frequent exceptions
Not every process will be a candidate for automation. Sometimes automating even one or two steps can create major time savings.
Automation also takes time to build and maintain. If you’re only spending a few minutes a month completing a task, then building an automation that will take several hours to create and regularly maintain likely isn’t worth it. But if the task is something you consistently spend time on each day or week, then a workflow may prove more beneficial.
Start Small
If you have a process that seems like it may be a strong candidate for automation, you can start with one small improvement. Automating one task can be enough to create a noticeable difference in your day-to-day work.
Starting small also allows you to confirm that processes are functioning as expected, so if there are challenges along the way, you’re able to make adjustments before they impact larger processes or create rework. Small changes over time have the potential to add up to significant time savings.
