Categories are a feature in Bridge that allow for learner-facing organization. They give an admin the ability to expose different catalogs of content to different learners based on smart group affiliations and serve to increase searchability (you can read more on this topic here).

They are also a feature that can support backend content management for admins and authors. This can happen when choosing no relevance for the category but rather allowing it to populate in the backend and affiliating content with it to support administrative searchability.

If you are leveraging the Bridge default Author role and you would like to use categories for organization, then you will want to give Authors the ability to see categories. This is a permission that is flexible for the role.

Go to Admin > Users & Permissions > Roles & Permissions. You will search for “Categories” and then you will need to check the box for the Author to have permission to view categories.

You can now add content to categories that your authors will be able to view. By combining this practice with a standardized nomenclature for titling learnables, you can decrease some of the headaches of finding content (and making sure that duplicates of content are not created).

Another really useful functionality of the backend categories is their use in reporting. The Analytics Transcript tool has a filter for tags and categories. While the category may not be learner facing, it can help to aggregate a catalog of content for reports that need to be pulled ad hoc or scheduled. In this example, we are using “Safety” as a category.

Categories are managed in Admin > Learning > Manage Categories. This “Safety” category is not something that we need learners to see. We need to pull reports on the specific courses in this category every week to ensure that learners are staying up to date on compliance training.

Clicking into this category will expose two key areas: content and groups. In this example, there are two courses that belong in this category (categories can also be used on programs, checkpoints, and live trainings).

The key to make this applicable only in the backend (and for reporting) is to NOT add any group relevance. 

So, in this example, we have no groups added, which means that the category cannot be visible in the Learning Library for any learners.

SIDE NOTE. Categories can only have relevance set for visibility in the Learning Library. They cannot have required or recommended options for any group.

Please reach out to support@bridgeapp.com if you have any questions!