Training Category
A training category is the drawer a course is filed in: safety, quality, technical, management. You build the list once, and every course then belongs to one of them so the training manager can see how much of the year's effort went where.
What it is for
Clients do not think about courses one at a time. They think in groups: the safety training, the quality training, the supervisory training. The category is that group.
Keep the list short. Six to ten categories covers a 500 person manufacturer comfortably. A long list stops being useful the moment the HR officer has to guess which of three similar categories a course belongs to.
The code must be unique. The system refuses a second category with a code already in use.
Every field, in plain words
| Field | What it means | What to put in it | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Training Category | The short code you will see in lists and lookups. | SAFETY | Required. Must be unique. Keep it short and in capitals. |
| Name | The readable name of the category. | Safety and Occupational Health | Typed in each language the client uses. |
| Blocked | Retires a category you no longer want anybody to pick. | Leave unticked | Tick it instead of deleting. Courses already filed under it keep the category. |
How to configure it
- Ask the client how they group their training. Write the list down before you type anything.
- Create one record per group. Code SAFETY, Name Safety and Occupational Health. Save.
- Repeat for QUALITY, TECHNICAL, SUPERVISORY, COMPLIANCE and INDUCTION.
- Stop. Do not add a category for something the client has never trained anybody on.
Scenarios
We want to report how much we spend on safety training against everything else
Put every safety course under the SAFETY category and nothing else. The category is the only thing that groups courses, so a report that separates safety spend from the rest is only as good as the discipline of this field on Training Course. If a client cannot agree which courses are safety courses, settle that argument before you type the list, not afterwards.
What it is connected to
- Training Course files each course under one category.
- Training Need lets you raise a need against a category rather than a specific course, for the case where a man needs safety training and HR will choose the course later.
- Renaming a category changes it everywhere, including on old records. Changing the code is not the same thing and will leave old records pointing at a code that no longer exists, so settle codes at setup.
If something looks wrong
- "It will not let me save" - the code is already in use by another category, including a blocked one.
- "A category I retired still shows on an old course" - that is correct. Blocking stops new use, it does not rewrite history.