Your Trainings Are Now Personnel Records
For California practices. SB 513 folds every mandated training into the employee file — with a required format, a 30-day production clock, and a three-year shelf life. A California clinic runs more of these than almost any other small employer.
Most California medical practices treat the personnel file as a thin thing: the offer letter, the I-9, a tax form, maybe a signed handbook acknowledgment. As of January 1, 2026, it is wider. SB 513 (Durazo) amends the state’s personnel-records statute, Labor Code § 1198.5, to bring education and training records inside the file an employee can demand to see — and it tells employers what those records must contain.
The mechanics are simple and worth knowing precisely. A current or former employee, or their representative, may inspect or obtain a copy of the training and education records the employer maintains. The employer has 30 calendar days to produce them, or 35 with a written agreement. Each record the employer keeps must now carry five things: the employee’s name, the name of the training provider, the date and duration, the core competencies covered — including any equipment or software skills — and the resulting certification or qualification. Records must be retained for at least three years after employment ends. The requirement reaches both trainings mandated by law and the practice’s own internal programs.
Now count how many trainings a medical practice actually runs. Sexual-harassment prevention under SB 1343. Workplace violence prevention under SB 553. HIPAA and CMIA privacy training. Bloodborne-pathogen and infection-control training under Cal/OSHA. Often more, depending on scope and setting. Almost no other small employer stacks mandated trainings the way a clinic does. SB 513 takes that stack — much of which already existed as a compliance obligation — and converts it into a documented, formatted, retained, and discoverable record set with a deadline attached.
That conversion is the part to sit with. The training log was a thing you kept to prove compliance to a regulator who might one day ask. It is now a thing the employee can ask for directly, on a 30-day clock, and it has a statutory content standard it either meets or it doesn’t. The gap between “we did the training” and “we have a record that names the provider, the date, the duration, the competencies, and the credential” is exactly the gap SB 513 closes — and it closes it in the employee’s favor.
The exposure is familiar to anyone who reads this publication. It is not the training that fails; it is the record of it. A practice that ran a workplace-violence session in a back room and noted it on a sign-in sheet has done the substantive thing and missed the documentary one. In a FEHA dispute, a Cal/OSHA inquiry, or a wrongful-termination claim, the training file is now an exhibit the other side is entitled to, and an incomplete file is its own small admission. The binder in the drawer is no longer merely unread; it is now producible.
None of this requires new trainings. It requires that the trainings already being done generate records in the form the statute names, that those records are kept for three years past separation, and that someone in the practice can find and produce them inside a month. That is an operations problem, not a legal one — which is precisely why it will be neglected until the first request arrives, usually from a former employee with a lawyer and a reason.
We will publish a one-page SB 513 record template — the five required fields mapped to the trainings a typical California practice already runs — in a future issue. The compliance was always supposed to be there. After January 1, the record has to be too.