Overview
Ok, now for a bit of a bigger step. In this step, you’ll set up some custom fields for your users and categories for your training.
This is step 4 in the implementation process (it follows step 3 – Branding). After this step, you’ll be ready for step 5 – User setup and management.
How to complete this step?
To complete this step, follow the actions below:
Decide which Custom Fields your organisation needs. You may need some internal discussions about this. Fields are the data labels for your users – like Location, Division, Team and so on. You will need to decide what data you want to store for your learners. This data can be captured as free text, numbers or dates, or you can create a list of options to select from. Once set up, you can use your custom fields to help manage groups of learners for enrolments and reporting. However, each field you add needs to be populated and updated! So just add relevant fields which make sense for your organisation. Then, when ready, move to the next action.
Add Custom Fields. This includes configuring the relevant visibility settings for each field which can be made visible within online tables, visible to users, and visible to assessors (when assessing explorer contributions). Find out more about how to create your custom fields here.
Decide which Categories your organisation needs. Once again, you may need some internal discussions about this. Categories are labels you can apply to training (topics, articles and pathways). You can use categories to filter your training and also reports – for example, create a report of enrolments in the category ‘Safety’, which would bring back enrolments from any training with that category.
Add your Categories. Find out how to create your categories here.
IMPORTANT: When creating Custom Fields for data associated to your users, we strongly advise to not store highly sensitive data. Highly sensitive data includes things such as: Date of birth, home addresses, licence/passport numbers, payroll information (bank accounts, tax, super).
Whilst security at Tribal Habits is maintained at a high standard, Custom Fields and their data, can be exposed to admins, managers or assessors within the portal, which can create a risk, whether by accident or malicious behaviour if not maintained and managed correctly.
User data populated for Custom Fields in an LMS should be restricted to information that is needed to purely help manage enrolments such as: Job Title, Division, Role, Office Location - company only information.
What are the best practices with this step?
It’s a good idea to decide on your Custom Fields at this stage of your implementation. This allows you to populate your fields against your users in the next step and avoids having to re-populate those fields later on when you’ve already uploaded your users. Keep in mind, however, it's not possible to change a custom field's type (i.e. Text, Number, Date, List) at a later date. To be clear – this step is just about determining your fields. You will upload user data (with their fields) in the next step).
Only create fields for data you really need for learning purposes. Every field you create needs to be populated and needs to be updated. So try to avoid unnecessary fields that just end up creating more effort to maintain later. Typical fields might be location (or City or State or Country), Team (or Division or Cohort) and Job Title.
Categories are great for helping admins manage training, particularly over time when you might have many many modules! However, categories can also be used for managing continuing education by enabling time and points allocation. Learn more about continuing education in this article. Continuing education is an advanced feature we’ll come back to at the end of this implementation process too – don’t worry to much about it just yet.
What are examples of this step in action?
Small organisation:
Our small organisation decides on Custom Fields such as ‘Start Year’, ‘Department’ and ‘Role’. They set up Categories for ‘Compliance’, ‘Induction’ and ‘Processes’.
Medium organisation:
With two work sites, our medium organisation adds a Custom Field called ‘Location’. They also have Custom Fields for ‘Division’, ‘Cohort’ and ‘Team’. They set up Categories for ‘Safety’, ‘Behaviours’, ‘Skills’, ‘Products’ and ‘Induction’.
Large organisation:
Our largest organisation has staff across multiple locations, including different states and cities. They choose to have Custom Fields such as ‘State’, ‘City’, ‘Region’, ‘Role’, ‘Department’ and ‘Start Year’. They set up Categories for ‘Safety’, ‘Security’, ‘Health’, ‘Personal Development’ and ‘Product Knowledge’.