A training matrix looks like a skills matrix and does a different job. The skills matrix asks what can these people do. The training matrix asks what have they completed, and when does it run out.
The second question is less interesting and considerably more urgent, because it is the one that stops somebody at a gate.
What belongs in it
The test is simple: if it can expire and stop someone working, it goes in.
For a contracting company working Australian resources, that usually means:
- General industry induction — Standard 11 for Queensland coal, or the state equivalent.
- Site-specific inductions, per client site, each with its own validity.
- Health assessments — the Coal Mine Workers' Health Scheme assessment, and any client-required medicals, drug and alcohol clearances or fitness-for-work assessments.
- High risk work licences and statutory tickets.
- First aid, CPR and emergency response, which typically have shorter currency than everything else and are the most frequent cause of a quiet lapse.
- Task and plant training — the statements of attainment behind what people operate.
- Verifications of competency, with their site-set currency periods.
- Client-specific requirements that exist nowhere else, which every contracting company has and which are always the ones that get missed.
Things that do not expire — a trade qualification, a degree — belong in a personnel file rather than a currency matrix. Putting them in adds columns that never change and trains people to ignore the grid.
The only column that matters
A training matrix that records what people have completed, with no dates, is an archive. It cannot prevent anything.
The useful matrix has, for every cell: completed on, valid until, and next action. And the view people actually work from is not the grid at all. It is the sorted list: what expires in the next sixty days, and who does it belong to.
If your matrix cannot produce that list in one action, it is not doing the job, however complete it is.
Lead times are not one number
The most common design error is a single expiry alert — thirty days, for everything.
Thirty days is far too much notice for a two-hour online refresher, which means it becomes noise that people learn to dismiss. It is not nearly enough for a coal mine workers' health assessment (formerly known as the coal board medical), which requires booking with a doctor on the RSHQ-approved list, and in regional Queensland — Mackay, Emerald, Rockhampton — appointment availability is genuinely constrained. A worker whose health assessment lapses in three weeks may not be able to get one in three weeks.
Set the lead time per credential type, based on how long the renewal actually takes to arrange in the places your people live:
| Credential | Practical lead time |
|---|---|
| Online refresher | 2–3 weeks |
| Site induction | 3–4 weeks |
| First aid / CPR | 4–6 weeks |
| Standard 11 refresher | 6–8 weeks |
| Health assessment | 8–12 weeks |
| High risk work licence renewal | 8–12 weeks |
These are starting points, not rules. The right number is the one that reflects your own experience of how long it takes to get a booking in the town your team lives in.
Per site, not just per person
For a contracting company with more than one client, the global matrix is misleading in a specific and dangerous way.
Requirements differ between sites. One client's induction is valid for twelve months, another's for two years. One requires a VOC every twelve months, another accepts twenty-four. One accepts a medical that another will not. A worker can be simultaneously fully current for client A and short of something for client B.
A matrix that shows one status per person will show that worker as compliant. Your coordinator will roster them. They will drive four hours.
What is needed is the status per person, per site — which is genuinely hard to maintain by hand, because the number of cells is people multiplied by sites multiplied by requirements, and every one of them has a date on it. This is the point at which a spreadsheet stops being a reasonable tool, and it usually arrives around thirty people and three clients.
Attach the evidence to the record
A matrix is an index. What gets asked for is the document.
Keep the certificate, the licence photograph, the medical clearance and the assessment record attached to the record they belong to, not in a parallel folder tree organised by whoever scanned them. The most common version of this failure is a well-maintained matrix and a shared drive where the supporting documents are filed by date received, which means producing evidence for one worker requires searching a hundred folders.
Anything you cannot produce in a minute, you effectively do not hold.
Signs yours has stopped working
- Somebody has been turned around at a gate in the last twelve months.
- The person who maintains it is the only one who understands it.
- The last update was made after a client asked for something.
- It contains people who have left, or is missing people who started.
- Nobody can tell you what expires next month without opening it and looking.
- Renewals are arranged in the week they are due rather than the month before.
Each of these is normal, and none of them means anyone is doing a bad job. They mean the tool has been outgrown — which for most contracting companies happens quietly, somewhere between the second client and the fortieth worker, and is only noticed at the gate.
