Useful competence records connect a person’s work with the evidence behind a decision that they can do it. Keep the attendance record, assessment and any follow-up together so a reviewer can understand that decision without reconstructing it from several spreadsheets.
Edition matters. The auditing guidance cited here concerns ISO 9001:2015 clause 7.2; it is not a claim about the requirements of any later edition. Check ISO’s catalog for the current edition of ISO 9001 and your certification body’s transition arrangements before applying clause-specific requirements. ISO catalog, ISO Auditing Practices Group.
- Keep course attendance and demonstrated ability as separate pieces of evidence.
- Make the person, task, assessment result and follow-up easy to retrieve together.
- Treat the table below as a practical record design, not a mandatory ISO template.
- A software record does not determine certification or guarantee an audit outcome.
Attendance and competence answer different questions
The APG’s 2015-edition competence guidance explains that course participation may not establish workplace capability, and discusses evidence showing how a person was judged competent. APG papers are educational auditing guidance, not additional normative requirements. APG competence guidance, pp. 4 to 6.
For a fictional machine setup exercise, an attendance sheet answers who attended the instruction. A separate observation can capture whether the operator selected the correct setup, followed the procedure and checked the result. Store the two records together without treating one as a substitute for the other. See the glossary entries for competency and competency assessment.
A practical evidence table
The following fields are recommendations for organizing your own program. Confirm any required fields against your applicable standard, contracts and workplace obligations.
| Record element | Example of useful detail | Retrieval question it answers |
|---|---|---|
| Person and task | Employee identifier, role, machine or process | Whose capability was considered, and for what work? |
| Basis for the task expectation | Procedure identifier and revision used in the exercise | What work was the assessment about? |
| Learning or experience | Course/version, date, provider or relevant experience | What preparation was considered? |
| Assessment method | Observation, work sample or another suitable method | How was capability checked? |
| Assessment decision | Result, date and assessor | Who made the decision and what was the outcome? |
| Evidence | Completed checklist, work sample or attached document | What supports the result? |
| Follow-up | Further practice, restrictions or reassessment date | What remains to be done? |
Use consistent employee and course identifiers. A filename such as setup-check-final-new.pdf is difficult to distinguish from its predecessors; associate it with the relevant person, procedure revision and assessment date instead. Avoid overwriting an earlier assessment just because a later one is available.
Use a matrix as the index
A training matrix is useful for finding gaps, but a colored cell alone cannot explain a competence decision. From the summary, a reviewer should be able to reach the relevant completion, supporting file and assessment. For a recurring task, keep upcoming work visible separately from completed evidence.
Start with one department and a small group of real tasks. Check that similar course names have not been used for different procedures. Then choose a few records and try to retrieve the supporting evidence without asking the person who entered them. Missing links, ambiguous versions and an unexplained assessment outcome are useful cleanup findings before a wider rollout.
Keeping the records in TrainGrid
TrainGrid records training completions, attached evidence, course versions, entered training hours and competency assessments. Completion and assessment remain distinct. Importing an employee roster creates people; courses and assignments are separate steps before the matrix becomes useful. The product does not import a historic training matrix or determine whether a person meets an ISO requirement.
TrainGrid is standard-agnostic. Manufacturing programs can organize records associated with ISO 9001, ISO 45001 and OSHA-style safety alongside food-safety programs such as SQF, BRCGS, FSSC, HACCP and GMP. Those names describe the programs whose evidence a team manages, not separate certified product editions.