Step 3 - Create Learning Plan Assignments

Watch the Learning Plan Assignment Tutorials for a complete walk through of how to create and edit learning plan assignments.

Before you create learning plan assignments, create a detailed plan that considers the long-term training needs for your entire organization, and ensures your employees are always compliant.

  1. Consider the following questions.

    2. Your training plan should cover federal and local regulations for all mandatory training. Several courses are offered in multiple versions in order to meet the needs of varying locales. For example, safe driving courses are offered for countries that drive on the right side of the road as well as the left side.

    Understand who your audiences are and the users that are associated with them. All your employees may be required to take Workplace Harassment courses, but your managers may be required to take Workplace Harassment courses designed specifically for managers, or for specific locales. For example, the Manager's Harassment course has a version specifically for New York based managers.

    In Compliance, audiences are hierarchical and inherit assignments from higher level audiences. You cannot assign less stringent courses to a lower level audience that inherits the assignment from a higher level audience. Additionally, a user may be associated with more than one audience and receive the same course assigned with different settings such as due dates or recurring dates. Understanding inheritance and stringency will help you understand which assignment the user receives.

    Some courses are mandated by local regulations and should be required. However, you can assign optional courses to your users for their own personal growth and knowledge.

    Additionally, optional courses never generate email notifications, and only appear in reports if selected.

    Users do not have to retake one time only courses, but recurring courses must be taken again and the system will automatically reassign them to the users based on the settings you choose.

    How often a course is due again is called the 'validity period' and options include every [number] of days, weeks, or years, based on the settings you choose. For example, some courses may be required every two years, but certain locales may require the same course be taken every year. You can create audiences for each locale and assign the appropriate course accordingly.

    Recurring courses can be due again based on the individual user's completion, or based on a calendar date, regardless of the completion date. You may want all users assigned a specific course to complete it by a certain time of the year. For example, if your company is audited for compliance in June, you may want all users to complete the annual Workplace Harassment course by May 15th each year.

    You can determine how many days before the due date users should see a course assignment in their learning plan. For example, new hires are typically required to take several courses in order to be compliant with company policies. If these courses are all due within 90 days of the hire date, you can set some courses to appear in the learning plan 60 days before the due date, or 30 days before the due date, etc.

    Exemptions excuse users from taking a course for a certain amount of time. For example, a user with a back injury may be exempt for 3 months from taking the Preventing Back Injuries course. Equivalencies allow users to receive a completion if they take a course that meets the same requirements. For example, your company may require Basic First Aid for all employees. However, a volunteer fire fighter who works for your organization may take an Advanced First Aid course that covers the same material and therefore creates an equivalency to the basic course.

  2. Read the following topics in the Compliance Knowledge Base to help you answer the above questions:
  3. Once you formulate a strategic plan for assigning content to your users:
  4. Then: