Who's in charge? Connect trainers seamlessly to your course offerings

There goes your planning. And there goes your peace.

Matching supply and demand for courses is a complex puzzle. You're not only dealing with available space (the classroom), but also with an available person (the trainer). And while a classroom patiently waits to be used, people may have vacation days, doctor's appointments, or perhaps they're already scheduled with another client.

Are you still using Excel sheets or separate calendars to manage this? Then there's a good chance of double-booking. i-Reserve solves this puzzle for you by managing trainers just as intelligently as your classrooms. In this article, we explain how to seamlessly connect instructors to your course offerings.

People are also 'Resources'

In i-Reserve we often talk about "Resources." That might sound a bit technical and unsociable when you're talking about your favorite teachers, but it's the foundation of a solid schedule.

A resource is essentially everything you need to make a booking possible. It could be a tennis court, a projector, a meeting room, or even a person.

By creating your trainers in the system as a "Staff" resource, you give them their own identity in the schedule. You enter them with their first and last names and, importantly, you can then link them to activities.

This is the starting point of the logic. The system now knows: for the "Accounting for Beginners" course, I need not only "Room 3," but also "Teacher Peters.".

Real-time control: the editor of your schedule

How do you prevent "Teacher Peters" from being double-scheduled? Simple: the system monitors your progress.

When you schedule a new course and select an employee in the staff section, i-Reserve immediately performs an availability check in the background.

• Is the teacher already scheduled for another lesson at that time?
• Has the teacher requested leave?
• Is it outside of his or her working hours?

If the answer to any of these questions is "yes," you'll receive an immediate notification. The system protects you from yourself. You can only confirm the booking if both the venue and the trainer give the green light. This gives you peace of mind. You no longer have to manually sift through three different Outlook calendars or hope you've remembered correctly.

Bulk Actions: Speed ​​Up

Do you have a ten-week course series? Then you don't want to manually select the same instructor ten times. With the Bulk Scheduling feature, you can select the entire course series at once and assign the regular instructor. The system then checks availability for all ten dates at once.

No more passing the buck: let trainers do it themselves

As a planner, you're often the conduit for information. "Are you available on Tuesday?", "No, I have to go to the dentist then," "Okay, and Wednesday?".

All that emailing and calling takes up a ton of time. Why not turn it around?

In i-Reserve you can link the resource (the trainer) to a user account. This gives your teachers and trainers access to a separate part of the system.

This has two major advantages:

1. They manage their own availability

Trainers can log in themselves and indicate when they can and cannot work.

• The Freelancer: Often works on an hourly basis. They can specify in the system exactly which times of day they are available for you.
• The Fulltimer: Works for you permanently, but also takes vacation time. He simply logs his leave or absence.

You'll see this reflected immediately in your schedule. If a trainer is "red" in the schedule, you know you don't need to call them.

2. They see their own schedule

"Where was I supposed to be tomorrow?" A trainer no longer needs to ask you that. They log in and see their personal schedule, including locations and times. Everyone is kept up to date, without you having to email schedules every day.

Visual overview

Sometimes you just want to see at a glance how things are going. In the i-Reserve schedule, you can use colors for each employee.

In the monthly overview you can immediately see:

• Blue is Teacher Jan.
• Green is Teacher Els.
• Gray has not yet been filled in.

You can immediately see where the gaps are and whether the workload is distributed fairly.

You have the strategy, we have the puzzle

Planning courses and training is a human process. You need to ensure the right match between the group and the instructor. That's where your expertise lies. Checking whether the instructor is already in another classroom is a mathematical exercise. That's where our expertise lies.

By incorporating your trainers as resources into your system, you eliminate the risk of errors in your process. You prevent double bookings, embarrassing phone calls to trainees, and workplace stress.

Done with the planning puzzle?

Want to see how i-Reserve can make your scheduling foolproof? Stop guessing and start knowing. Try the i-Reserve booking system free for 30 days . Connect your first trainer and experience the peace of mind of a system that thinks along with you.