Ask an L&D team where their training record lives and you often get two answers. The online courses are in a platform. Everything else is in someone’s spreadsheet, in an email thread, or nowhere: last quarter’s workshop, the conference three people attended, the rotation a manager arranged, the course a department bought directly.
That split is why annual training reports take days to assemble and still get questioned. A conference cannot be moved inside a platform, so the fix is to keep the record of it in the same place as everything else.
Assign it like anything else
The first move is to stop treating external training as a special case. A workshop, a conference, a rotation, or a course hosted somewhere else can be assigned to a person with a deadline and written instructions, the same way an internal module is.
What the instructions need to say is what will count as done. This is where external assignments tend to fail: "attend the compliance workshop" leaves the employee guessing whether a calendar invitation, a photograph of a certificate, or nothing at all is the expected reply.
- Courses on an external platform: Name the exact course and what proof of completion looks like, usually the provider’s certificate.
- Workshops and conferences: Name the session and the date. Attendance is the evidence, so say who confirms it.
- Job rotations and shadowing: Name the period and the person supervising it, because the confirmation has to come from them, not the employee.
Tell people once, in the place they already look
An assignment that arrives as a forwarded email from a manager gets lost against everything else in an inbox. One that arrives as a notification in the same app the employee uses for their other training does not, and it carries the deadline and the instructions with it.
The practical test is whether an employee can answer "what training do I owe, and by when" without asking anyone. If they cannot, the information is hard to find, and reminders sent later only patch that.
Confirm completion with something you can show
External training is only in the record once someone has confirmed it happened. Employees upload the certificate, the attendance confirmation, or whatever the assignment asked for. It is stored against the assignment, and the report reads from it.
For training delivered off-platform, a short assessment afterwards adds a lot to the attendance record. Attendance says someone was in the room. A before-and-after assessment says whether it changed what they know, which is what decides whether to buy that workshop again.
With Salalem’s AI add-on, the questions for those assessments can be drafted from the workshop material and its objectives, which is the slow part of building them. A person on your team reviews and approves the questions before anyone sees them. The AI drafts, and your team decides.
What this changes
With one record, the annual figure comes from one place and nothing needs reconciling. Gaps also show up while there is still time to close them, rather than at filing time.
For Saudi employers there is a second reason: much of the training you disclose on Qiwa can be external training too. A record that covers only what happened inside one platform understates what the business actually invested.