Now that you’ve got to grips with Grouping courses into learning profiles, you know that you can create a learning profile for someone based on the job that they do (i.e. their job type) and you’ll have assigned it using Manage job types:

You now find yourself in a situation where you need some of your people to have access to a particular course not because of the job that they do but because of where they work.

And we have a solution to your challenge…

Consider this scenario: Rise and Dine has a number of Distribution Centres and they all have managers, so they all have the same job type and learning profile:

Swindon DC has an asbestos roof and therefore we want to give the Asbestos for Managers course to “all DC managers in the Swindon DC”. We can’t simply add it to the Manager(DC) learning profile because then this course will go to everyone that has that learning profile.

Here’s how we achieve this…

First we need to create a location attribute, so select Courses … Assign Courses:

And then Location Attributes:

Create a new attribute:

… and give it a name and meaningful description before saving it:

Use Manage company structure to search for a location:

… and assign that attribute to that location by ticking the location attribute and pressing Edit location to apply the change:

Now for the clever bit! We can now set up a rule which will assign a course to a location based on its location attribute.

Go to Link attributes to courses:

(It’s right next door so it’s easy to find)

.. and press New:

Give your new “rule” a sensible name (so that you can easily find it again when you need to update it in the future!):

And pick the relevant location attribute and courses and press Add each time. You’ll know you’ve done it right when they appear below the blue title bars in each case:

If were to just leave this rule like this then it will assign the Asbestos for Managers course to everyone in a location that with the “Has Asbestos” location attribute. This isn’t quite correct because we only want this course to go “DC Managers”.

So we need to refine our rule slightly to only make it relevant to anyone with the “Manager (DC)” job type. Pick the job type drop down and pick “Manager (DC)”:

Here’s top tip! Just before you hit Save, check what you’ve done by reading it out load (people with think you’re nuts but it works!).

Read it from top to bottom like this:

“My Asbestos courses rule will apply to everyone who is a Manager (DC) job type and works in a location that has the Has asbestos location attribute; and it will give them the Asbestos Awareness for Managers course.“

Note that this rule will apply in addition to whatever courses are already on their learning profile.

Let’s take this one step further. What if adapted our rule slightly to include something about the person as well (other than their job type). What if we wanted the course to only go to someone who was also a Warehouse Safety Officer as well:

“My Asbestos courses rule will apply to everyone who is a Manager (DC) job type; works in a location that has the Has asbestos location attribute; and is also a Warehouse Safety Officer and it will give them the Asbestos Awareness for Managers course.“

We can do this using a personal attribute:

A personal attribute can be anything. It might be a key holder, a fire warden and if you’re allocating certain courses to people who are over 18 then their personal attribute might be “>18”.

Pick New:

In our example our personal attribute is Warehouse Safety Officer, so enter that as your description and Save:

To assign a personal simply use Link attributes to courses to edit your rule, pick your personal attribute from the dropdown and press Add:

So, how do I assign a personal attribute to a person?

Easy, use Learners … Overview to find your learner and edit them:

Pick Edit assigned attributes:

Choose the relevant attribute(s) from the dropdown:

Personal attributes are automatically assigned when you press Add:

To remove an attribute from a person, simply click on the “remove” cross and press OK when prompted:

“Okay, so this is great, but what if I need to update a load of people with a personal attribute. I have courses that only apply to people who are over 18 years of age, I have set up a personal attribute called ‘>18’ so do I really have to do them one a time? That’ll take me ages!”

That’s a very valid question, and no, we won’t make you do them one at a time!

Just go to Assign courses… Personal Attributes and click on the “set up” icon:

Here you’ll see an option to add people one at a time or import a complete list:

To add people one at a time just enter their username and press Add:

They’ll appear straightaway in the list:

You can remove them individually at a later date by pressing the remove icon. If you want to add lots of people then you just need to prepare a file with a list of usernames and then press the Choose file option.

To prepare a list of people you just need something like Excel, or even a simple text editor where you can put each person’s username on a single row:

and save the file as a “csv” file.

Choose this file and then press Import:

It’ll do its thing for a bit:

… and it’ll tell you when it’s finished.

Press Back to see the results:

“And I don’t suppose we could import location attributes as well can we?”

Yes, just go to the “set up” icon for the attribute that you want to assign lots of times:

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!

Work through this practical example in Assigning courses everything you need to know

You might also find these useful:

Managing your company structure

Grouping courses into learning profiles