Assigning courses to learners

Learning profiles are all well and good until you find that you’ve somehow managed to collate hundreds of them, and you just don’t know which way is up with half of them! You end up with profiles that are basically the same minus one or two small differences, and it just becomes quite difficult to navigate and correctly assign everyone with the courses they need. And this challenge especially rings true with organisations that have a large workforce.

But as we’re here to make managing your courses and learners as easy and straightforward as possible, we’ve developed a tool – Link attributes to courses - that will both save you heaps of time (and stress!), and declutter your system of unnecessary learning profiles for a more streamlined and efficient learning process.

Let’s start at the beginning with your typical learner profile.

Every learner will be assigned a learner profile based on their job type, and these profiles will dictate what courses a learner sees when they log in to their roadmap.

So, in its simplest form, we can assign courses to a learner profile based on the job that they do. For example, Shahed works in the Head Office, or Central Support as it’s called here. This job means that she gets, as standard, the Colleague (CS) courses learning profile:

And if the Colleague (CS) learning profile...

… has the following courses:

Then it stands to reason that Shahed will see these courses when she logs in:

For more information on learning profiles, you might find this guide useful: How to group courses into learning profiles.

So, that’s your typical learning profile. But what if we also want to assign courses to Shahed because of where she works? She not only needs courses based on her job type, but also due to her location. And this is where we can now assign a course to a location attribute.

You might find this guide useful: What are location attributes and why do we have them.

So, let’s say we’ve created a location attribute called ’Equipment’:

And we assign it to Shahed’s location:

Now we need to create a new ‘rule’ that tells the system to ‘assign some courses to anyone who is in a location that has the Equipment location attribute’.

To do this, we need to link attributes to courses. And these are essentially the ‘rules’ we want to create for certain courses:

Pick New:

Give it a name and leave the Job type dropdown menu as ‘Choose’. If you want this rule to only be applied to learners with certain job types, such as managers, then you would use this dropdown menu to find the relevant job type.

After you’ve named your new course group, you’ll need to pick an organisation attribute. In this case, we’re selecting the Equipment attribute we created earlier:

Remember to select Add, so that the selected attribute appears in the list:

One thing to bear in mind when you’re adding location attributes is that if you assign two or more attributes to a course group, then the rule becomes ‘assign these courses to locations with all these attributes’.

So, if we were to add another attribute to this course group (for example, stores that serve alcohol), we would be saying only assign these courses to learners with both the Equipment and Alcohol location attributes, and not either or. And so, anyone that’s in a location with a Equipment attribute, but not the Alcohol one, won’t be assigned the courses in this grouping.

And then from the members list, add all the courses that you want to appear in this grouping (and remember to select Add each time so that they appear in the list underneath):

Then Save your changes:

Shahed can now see these extra courses on her roadmap!

Remember – if you want to assign additional Equipment courses, but only to people who are in a location that has the Equipment attribute, then go and add them to the course group you’ve created (and not add them to Shahed’s learner profile).

… and remember to Save.

Assigning courses by personal attributes

So, that’s covered assigning courses to a location (through its location attribute) but what about assigning courses to Shahed as an individual that don’t necessarily apply to the job that Shahed does? Easy!

Let’s say that Shahed is on a manager training programme that not all managers are on right now. This is an attribute that has nothing to do with where Shahed works (location) but has everything to do with Shahed as a person, but not because of the job that she does. And because it isn’t related to her job, she wouldn’t be assigned these courses on her learner profile.

Let’s think of it as a ‘personal attribute’:

Create a New one:

Give it a meaningful description and Save:

Then go and create a new separate course group (or ‘rule’) that we can assign courses to.

Just give the new group a meaningful name, assign it to the personal attribute you just created, add some relevant courses, and save.

Now all that’s left to do is to give this personal attribute to Shahed, so she can see these courses on her roadmap:

Go and find Shahed and Edit her details:

You can now Edit any user attributes that she has (or doesn’t have yet!):

Pick a personal attribute from the list and Add:

This will automatically add the attribute.

And then to exit you just select ‘Back to Edit Learner’.

Now Shahed has all the courses she needs:

… and remember, there are still only 9 courses assigned to his ‘official’ learning profile.

As briefly mentioned earlier in the guide, you can also extend this functionality if you need to by introducing a job type into the equation.

Think of the following course group as – Anyone in an ‘Age Restricted’ location, who’s also assigned the ‘Management Programme courses’ attribute, given the course Age Restricted Sales and When to Refuse (RPD5_E), but only if their job type is ‘Manager’.