Overview
This guide walk through custom fields and categories.
Every user in your portal has a set of standard fields, such as first name, last name and email address. Custom fields are the additional details you choose to capture, such as team, job title or location. They let you group users into cohorts so you can assign the right training to the right people.
Custom fields are essential to define before you add users. You can't add users until you've set up the fields you want to capture for them, and you can't set up training automations without them either. It's worth taking the time to get this right the first time.
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 learner 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 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?
Decide on your custom fields now. That way you can populate them when you upload users in the next step, rather than updating them later. Keep in mind that a field's type (Text, Number, Date or List) can't be changed once it's created. This step is only about defining your fields; you'll add user data in the next step.
Only create fields you really need for learning. Every field has to be populated and kept up to date, so unnecessary fields just add maintenance. Common fields include location (city, state or country), team (division or cohort) and job title.
Think carefully about which type to select for each custom field. 'List' fields give users a fixed set of options (added by you) keeping your data consistent, so filtering and automations work as expected. Free text fields allow any entry, which is good for flexibility, but can lead to typos and variations like "Melbourne," "Melb" and "Melborne." Your portal treats these as different values, so users may miss training they should have received.
Categories help admins organise and manage training, which becomes especially useful as your library of modules grows. They can also support continuing education goals by allocating time and points to training. You can learn more in this article about goals. Goals are an advanced feature we'll return to at the end of the implementation process, so don't worry about them 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’.