In many industries, learners are required to complete 'continuing education'. This often occurs in professional services, such as the legal, finance or engineering industries.
The amount of continuing education required for a role will vary depending upon your industry and country, but it is typically measured against required time or points. In either case, you can track both allocations for any type of continuing education requirement in Tribal Habits.
Set your continuing education annual period
By default, annual continuing education periods start in January (calendar years). However, organisations can select a different continuing education period.
Navigate to Admin → Account → Categories and click 'Edit Continuing Education' in the Continuing Education panel. Use the drop-down menu to select the month you want your continuing education period to start, then click 'Save'.
Set-up your continuing education categories
The second step is to set-up your required categories, using the Categories feature in Tribal Habits.
Typically, continuing education requirements fall across a number of categories. For example, you might be required to obtain education in theory, practice and community. In such cases, you need to create a category in Tribal Habits for each required aspect of your continuing education.
If your continuing education is simply a certain amount of any type of training, then you can just use your existing categories or create a single 'Continuing Education' category.
For each category of continuing education, you need to enable Time and/or Points allocation, depending on how your continuing education is tracked.
In this example, three continuing education categories have been set up for Technical, Practical and Ethical CPD and allocated for points tracking.
Assign categories and allocations to Tribal Habits knowledge
With your categories set-up, you now need to assign them to each of your topics and articles. Once again, this process is the same as the usual Categories feature.
However, after a continuing education category is applied to a topic or article, you must then allocate the appropriate time or points allocation.
Time allocation is assigned as a per cent of the topic or article time. For example, a topic may be allocated 100% to one category or 50% to two categories or any other combination (including 100% to all categories if that would be appropriate). Explorers will then receive the appropriate allocation of time towards that continuing education category.
Points allocation is assigned a an integer (round number) for each category. For example, 5 points for category one and 1 point for category two.
IMPORTANT - Continuing education time and points are applied when a topic or article is completed. This means:
They will not be applied to topics or articles which are already completed. This means that these continuing education time and points allocations are NOT back-dated to previously completed knowledge.
It also means that if you change the time or points allocation for a topic or article, it will not change the allocations already applied to previously completed knowledge.
Assign categories and allocations to external knowledge
Continuing education can also be tracked against external knowledge. When a user or admin records knowledge (external training, licences, accreditations, qualifications and so on) AND continuing education categories are established, then there is also an option to assign continuing education points or time against that recorded knowledge - just like a topic, article or pathway.
Reviewing continuing education results
Admins and explorers can review and download their continuing education records.
Explorers can access their Profile from their dashboard. It includes their time and points allocations for each continuing education category. The results can be filtered for various time periods and then downloaded into a PDF.
Admins can view any explorer in the Admin area and click on the History tab for that explorer to review their continuing education. In addition, Admins can filter the results by various time periods, as well as via key words and training status.
How can I switch off Continuing Education?
Continuing Education is on by default in all portals, however, for some organisations, Continuing Education may not be applicable and you might like to switch this off. To do this, navigate to Admin -> Account -> Subscription and locate the 'Continuing Education' panel and switch the toggle off, like below:
