“Location attributes by themselves may not actually do anything”, and this is absolutely true from a technical perspective. But they can, however, be an extremely useful tool in your quest to get the right courses to the right team members – with a little bit of help from Upskill People!
Let’s start by looking at what location attributes are! These are basically additional characteristics you can give certain groups of learners, allowing the platform to adapt to the specific learning needs you want in place for them. Creating a location attribute is simplicity itself, but before we get into that, let’s spend a few minutes exploring why you would want to set up a location attribute, and that starts with the user import routine (automated or otherwise).
Why use location attributes?
We use these attributes when we need to adapt the learning, which is available to your people, based on specific areas of your business.
It means you will have fewer learning profiles to manage, so saving you precious time and effort! It also means that everyone gets the exact learning and courses they need, which will then make your reporting that much easier too. It’s a win win!
For example: your teams might need access to standard courses like Safety, Health & Wellbeing and Fire Safety Essentials however, if they are in a store that also sells alcohol, then they will need to see their alcohol courses as well. And what if some of your stores contain asbestos? You’ll need to assign additional content for that too!
So, how do I go about giving the alcohol courses to my team in one store but not those in another? AND what about those teams in my older locations who need to be up-to-date with their asbestos training?
Well, I’m glad you asked – here’s how to set up a location attribute!
Managing location attributes
It all starts with your Organisation Structure where you need to navigate to a location (these all have the location pin symbol) and pick Attributes:
Here you’ll see all of the location attributes that have been assigned. Pick Add Attribute to search for and add another location attribute, in this scenario our location will also need some Asbestos-related content:
But hang on, an urgent request has just come in from the CEO! This location is going to trial the new Welcome Interview course that’s the latest initiative from the L&D Team, and it starts tomorrow!
No problem, let’s create a new location attribute just for our flagship store. Simply type the name of the new learner attribute and, when you’re ready, click where is says “Create new attribute called …”:
.. and when you press Create & Assign it will do just that! Use Manage Attributes to keep everything neat and tidy:
Renaming a location attribute is quick and easy, deleting a learner attribute is simplicity itself, but only if there are no assigned courses and you can also join two existing location attributes together so that they become one. All these things start with the “3 dots”:
What happens next?
That’s it, well done! But that’s not the whole story because, like I said at the beginning, it won’t work just because you’ve set up a location attribute – we now have to do something with it.
Creating a location attribute is just the first step. Assigning attributes to courses is where the magic happens, so be sure to check out this guide ASAP!
You might also find these guides useful: