How to manage new learners

Before you can add new learners, you need to understand a bit about how your company structure and course profiles are set up (so you know what courses to allocate to whom and where in the company they will be reported against). This should be set up by the platform administrator, if not you can’t add your new learners.

You might find these guides useful: How to manage your company structure and How to group courses into learning profiles.

You can add learners on the platform if you're responsible for managing a team (managers, supervisors, team leaders). So, this is how you do just that  and some notes on what each box (field) means:

• From the Manage people and places menu, pick Manage learner details

• Select the ‘Add Learner’ button. 

• The two tick boxes at the top of the screen - Report Exclude and Prevent Automatic Deactivation - are generally left unticked.

You don’t need to worry too much about Prevent Automatic Deactivation - this is a fail-safe that only gets used if we have set up an automated user import managed service for you. This service is when we import all your learners onto the platform for you. But one thing to mention about this importing service is that you won’t be able to make any manual changes yourself.

If you find that a learner account keeps getting set as inactive, just after the daily user import runs, then come back and tick this box.

Tick the ‘Report Exclude’ box if you don’t want this learner to appear in any reporting – you can use this for people who aren’t currently active in the business now (e.g. people on maternity/paternity leave or long-term sick). The last thing your managers need is being told that their learning completion reports are shocking, when their staff aren’t even available for work!

Note: you can also use this for your senior managers who know that they should be doing their learning… (or just name and shame, it’s your choice!)

• If Username and Password are auto filled e.g. your browser is set to autofill, you must check these values carefully before saving.
• Username needs to be unique – the learner’s email is best as that’s normally unique within your business, although it might not always be. You could also use a payroll number (a common option), or whatever works for you and your business.
• Type the password you want for your new learner, which you’ll then tell them, but they will then change when they next log in. ‘changeme’ is a good standard.
• Always remember to tick ‘Change password at next login’ - so the learner can make a new password secure to them when they next login. When creating a lot of new learners in one go, fatigue can kick in and this gets forgotten!
• Joining/role change dates – leave these set as the day you are setting up the learner, unless you know the actual dates and want to enter them.
• Leaving date – always leave blank (when they move on from the business then you can come back here and complete.
• Dashboard – these should be set up from the dropdown options available (for example, team member, manager, client admin, ECB), and the dashboard determines what applications a person gets to see and access when they login – the dashboard is just a collection of applications and is different for each user type. So, if you’re an administrator you will see more applications than a team member for example, as team members would normally go straight to their learning roadmap without the need to access any other applications.
• Employment type – choose one from the dropdown options available e.g. permanent, contractor, part-time or whatever has been set up as being relevant to your organisation.
• Job type – used for team member, supervisor, manager, etc. Again, choose these from the dropdown options available. (You might find this guide useful: How to manage job types)
• Learning profile – this is the group of courses you want this learner to have access to. (You might find this guide useful: How to group courses into learning profiles)
• Flexible profile – this is an advanced feature, not normally required by most organisations. When used sparingly it can be a very handy feature to have though. (You might find this guide useful: How to set up a flexible profile)

Company structure is represented by four levels – company, region, area, location.

You can only add people into the company structure that you have access to, hence you need to be a manager or an administrator to add new learners. The organisation options that you see are dependent on your own reporting access in most cases (see below). A store manager, for example, will only be able to add new learners into their own store. So, just choose from the dropdown options that you can see.

Remember, you can only assign a learner to a location – you are using the other three dropdowns in order to get to the correct location for the new learner. (You might find this guide useful: How to manage your company structure)

The Report Access Editor – if you are entering a new learner at supervisor level or above, you’ll need to complete this additional step. You are setting the access permission to various applications and reports here, to allow the learner to see the activities of others. (You might find this guide useful: Understanding the report access editor) 

• Once you’ve completed all the information, select Submit. Repeat until all your new learners are added.

Note: it’s really important that you check the email address for the learner you're adding – this is what makes their account secure to them and will help them if they forget their password in the future, so it must be accurate (no typos!) 

Their email address might also be used for sending learners an email alert telling them that their annual refresher training is due.

If you are assigning attributes to courses (have a look at Assigning attributes to courses) then you’ll assign a personal attribute to an individual by picking Edit personal attributes:

… picking the relevant personal attribute from the dropdown and pressing Add:

If the attribute name appears under the Attribute header then it has already been applied and can be deleted for this person by pressing the Remove cross icon:

If you cannot see any personal attributes to pick from then none have been created so, again, have a look at Assigning attributes to courses to find out how to create personal attributes.

What could possibly go wrong?…

When using manage learner details there are two key bits of information that must be unique before a learner's record can be saved, and these are username and email.

So, if you are trying to update record A and it’s failing because there is duplicate data in record B (which may also be an inactive user record!), then you must first go to record B and amend that data. If your challenge is because of a duplicate email address and record B is a leaver, then you'll no longer need the email address (because they won't be logging in if they've left!), so an email address can easily be deleted.

However, a username cannot ever be deleted but - if it's not going to be used again - then it can be renamed to something else instead. For example, if there was already a username called 13036 and you needed to change a new record to also be 13036, then you could rename the old username to be 13036_OLD, or anything that is unique, and this will then let you update the new record.

You’ve now learnt how to create a single new learner, if you want to add lots of people in one go then please have a read through the guide How to import learner details

The next guide in this section is ‘Manage learner passwords’