We need to assign training each month to current employees but we don't want each module assigned to future employees. I'd like a way to assign training to everyone hired in before a specific date (ex: August 31, 2018) to ensure training isn't assigned to everyone.
Both of these requests have a fairly simple solution to them, but each solution is quite different so I will address them one at a time.
Marla Cormier, for your situation, since you don't want future hires enrolled in the course, you will want to do the enrollment as a manual enrollment rather than an auto-enrollment. To do a manual enrollment, do the following:
Manual Enrollment
1. Go to Admin > Users & Permissions > Manage Users
2. Export the user list
3. Modify the export in Excel as needed to include just who you need it to include for the enrollment
4. Delete all the columns from your finished list except for the unique identifier
5. Save that file as a CSV
6. Go back to the course and select the Learners tab in the course
7. Select Add via CSV and choose the file you just created
That will enroll all the people that were on the list, but no one in the future.
Elise Steinharter, for your situation, you'll want to do the following:
Future Auto-enrollment (Excluding Current Employees)
1. Create a Smart Group that includes the people you need enrolled in the future - it will pick up everyone that is currently employed with those characteristics, but that's okay - if you want to just use the All Learners Smart Group that already exists, you can do that too
2. Go to Admin > Account Management > Account Settings
3. Turn off email and Slack notifications and save those settings - during the next part, this will prevent notifications from going out and confusing people
4. Go to the course and click on the Groups tab
5. Add the Smart Group to the Groups tab and set the Relevance to Required - this will enroll everyone currently in the Smart Group and set it up to enroll anyone that is added to the Smart Group in the future
6. When the enrollment is complete, go to the Learners tab within the course
7. Select Export Enrollments to get a complete list of learners enrolled in the course
8. Delete all the columns from the export except for the unique identifier column
9. Save the file as a CSV
10. Go the Learners tab in the course
11. Select Remove via CSV
12. Select the file you just saved - this will remove all current enrollees from the course and will NOT auto enroll them again - only new Smart Group members will be added to the course going forward
13. Go to Admin > Account Management > Account Settings
14. Turn back on email and/or Slack notifications and save your settings
It's a lot of steps, but it works like a charm. I did this with a new hire survey that we created and only wanted new people to go through.
Let me know if either of you have questions about these steps or if you need any further assistance with this.
Joshua Pope Thanks for putting together these steps. I am using the instructions to enroll all new users into a course. One thing that might be worth adding is that if you have a large population of users, this would be best to do after hours. We have about 5,000 users and for one course its taken about 30 minutes so far. With the email notifications being turned off its a long time to have an outage of that kind.
We currently use that manual process so I'm glad we're doing it right. I'd like to see hire date as a field for a smart group so that we could automate the process. That would also allow us to capture everyone hired in during the month of the assignment instead of manually uploading the report initially and then manually uploading new hires every two weeks.
So, if you are importing hire date as part of the profile, you can duplicate that field and use it to create smart groups. You could also duplicate the field and manipulate it so it works exactly the way you want for a smart group. For example, if you want people that were hired in March 2018, you could duplicate the hire dates and convert the format to a Month Year format in a custom field. You could also have it do some logic and just put an indicator in the field of whether or not they were hired after a certain date. This is easiest if you are doing CSV uploads. If you are doing a sync with your HRIS, I'm sure your HRIS manager could figure out how to do something similar.
I would love to see the smart groups add a greater than and less than option in the future for easier dealing with this, but for now, my recommendation above could do the trick for what you are wanting.
Thank you Joshua Pope for such great help here! Marla Cormier if you feel one of the replies is best, feel free to mark it correct. For now I am going to mark this question as assumed answered to separate it from others. Also, there is an idea open for voting that you may want to check out and add your support for at Advanced Logic for Smart Groups.
I have this on the opposite end - I am creating a new on-boarding program. I do not need current employees to take these courses but I would need all future employees to take it. If I could set the relevance for them to have to take it and be automatically enrolled when I create their accounts that would be great!