“Location attributes alone 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: a Sales Assistant 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 too.
So, how do I go about giving my Sales Assistants in ‘Store B’ the alcohol user profile but not those in ‘Store A’? … AND what about those in ‘Store C’ who I don’t want to have the new courses just yet because we won’t be selling alcohol there until 3 weeks’ time – how do I give it to them only when I need to?
Well, I’m glad you asked – here’s how to set up a location attribute!
From your dashboard select Courses … Assign Courses:
And then Location Attributes:
Press Add Location Attribute:
Name your new attribute something relevant:
… and then Save.
Why did we just do that?
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 an attribute – we now have to do something with it.
Creating a location attribute is the first step to Assigning attributes to courses so check out this guide ASAP!
Once this is all in place, then all you need to do is assign the location attribute you created to a location, using Managing your company structure
Simply edit the location you want the attribute to be assigned to, tick the attribute, and then select Edit location to save the change:
So, can you see that you are now in control over how this change gets rolled out to new locations? Using our example at the beginning, you can do the same for Store B now, but wait until you’re ready to roll this out to Store C before assigning the attribute!
Simply repeat this process whenever you have a requirement across different locations, where you have to assign a different learner profile than you would normally.
And you don’t need to assign location attributes one at a time, you can simply import a list.
In this example, I’m going to import 4 locations and an extra one that doesn’t exist to show you what happens:
Choose your pre-prepared csv file and press Import:
It’ll do its thing for a bit:
And then show the results, on this occasion “Location Name” was being used as a column header and because it wasn’t the name of an actual location, the attribute couldn’t be applied:
Important Note: This tool is expecting an Org1 Short Name. You’ll get a complete list by going to Manage company structure and downloading a full company structure export:
The Org1 Short Name will be in column B:
What a great tool to start with when preparing your list of location attributes to import!
If you need to change the name of the attribute, then just select Edit:
Change the name of it and select Save:
This won’t affect anything that we do on the post-import code, it literally just changes the name of the location attribute.
The next guide in this section is Understanding the report access editor
You might also find these useful:
Grouping courses into learning profiles