Overview
This is an optional step. If your organisation has existing training data, it may wish to migrate that data into your new Tribal Habits platform to have a single source of truth about your training information. If this does not apply to your organisation, you can skip this step.
If you do continue, then in this step you will consider how to migrate existing data into Tribal Habits. This is step 11 in the implementation process (it follows step 10 - Managers). After this step, you’ll do step 12 – First enrolments.
How to complete this step?
To complete this step, follow the process below:
Decide what data needs to be migrated. Not all historical training data needs to be migrated into your Tribal Habits platform. It is possible that merely retaining existing training data in an spreadsheet elsewhere would suffice for some data. Data migration is a task - sometimes a detailed and lengthy task. So it is worth considering if it is necessary to migrate all existing data. For example, elective training completed by employees 5-10 years ago may no longer have relevance for current training records and does not need to create data or clutter in your new platform. That information may be best saved in a spreadsheet just in case it is needed in the future. Equally, do you need to migrate every completion record for annual compliance training, or just the most recent completion or enrolment? This is an important step as it can dramatically reduce the effort required to complete this step.
Determine how migrated data will be stored in Tribal Habits. This question is about how data will be mapped and there are two options.
Mapping existing data to a matching topic, article or pathway in Tribal Habits. In this case, you are creating a topic, article or pathway in Tribal Habits which exactly matches your historical training content. As such, you would upload your existing training data as an enrolment into the relevant topic, article or pathway. This means you first need to create that topic, article or pathway - which may mean delaying the data migration until you have created all the matching training modules in Tribal Habits. You can then use our upload codes to create matching enrolments and use the CONQUERED code to set enrolments to complete (including backdating completion and certified dates) to match your existing data.
Uploading existing data as an external knowledge recording. In this case, you have existing training data which does not match anything in your Tribal Habits portal. It might be training completed externally (e.g. a first-aid certificate) or training completed internally but training that will not be recreated in your Tribal Habits platform. So there is no matching training module to enrol users into your platform. This means you can use our external knowledge records to simply upload training data for each person (including all the completion and certified dates).
Prepare your data. Once you have decided which data is to be migrated and whether it is being migrated as an enrolment or an external knowledge record, then you can start to prepare your data in spreadsheets - either way, you will be uploading CSVs of data. Use the links in the articles above to format your data correctly.
Upload your data. You can now upload your existing data, in the correctly formatted CSVs, as required.
What are the best practices with this step?
Data migration can be a lot of work. Our team can assist and give you advice to make the process as efficient as possible, but it can require considerable work at your end to ensure your data is accurate and in the right format. Consider the first step above carefully - what data do you really need to migrate?
You can only migrate enrolled or completed training data - you cannot migrate 'in progress' training data. If someone has partially completed an online training module, you cannot migrate a partial completion into Tribal Habits. The migration will be limited to completed (fully completed training) or enrolled (a new enrolment, starting from the beginning). As a result, you may wish to notify users who are 'in progress' with any existing training to ask that they complete it by a cut-off date (or else will have to start again after the migration). Remember to disable any existing LMS on the cut-off date to ensure no further data can be created in that platform.
Break down the migration into steps. First, select a recent date and focus on migrating everything up to that date. Select 5-10 users for a test and finalise and migrate their data first, confirming everything works as expected. Then migrate the remainder of the data to that date. Then, select a 'cut-off' date when all new training should be occurring in your Tribal Habits portal and inform all stakeholders of that date. Then you will need to do a second migration from the date of your first migration through to the cut-off date to capture all the final information. In some large migration exercises, this may become a three-step process - initial migration, secondary migration and then cut-off migration.
Remember, you don't need to complete an entire migration during implementation. You may finalise migration as you go - as you prepare more training that matches historical data. Just remember to extract all your existing learning data from any LMS that you are leaving before you discontinue with it!
What are examples of this step in action?
Small organisation:
Our small organisation has some excel spreadsheets with historical training data - some for old workshops which people attended and some data for external online compliance training. They decide to online migrate the external online compliance training data. First, they import matching topics from the Tribal Habits library and then they upload their completed enrolment details for each Tribal Habits topic, backdating completion and certified dates.
Large organisation:
Our large organisation is migrating from another LMS into Tribal Habits. They create a spreadsheet that lists all the different modules in their existing LMS and a column indicating whether that data will be (a) simply stored in a spreadsheet, (b) migrated to a matching Tribal Habits module or (c) migrated to an external training record in Tribal Habits. In another column they indicate how any matching Tribal Habits modules will be created - some are SCORM files migrating as is from the old LMS, some are topics from the Tribal Habits library and some are new topics being created in Tribal Habits. They have a final column with a date they expect to have each module ready.
They then set a cut-over date from the old LMS to Tribal Habits and notify all stakeholders that that is the final date for training completion data to be recorded in the existing LMS.
In the meantime, they start importing or creating Tribal Habits topics to prepare for the data migration. The data migration then occurs in two stages - an initial migration of the data up to 'today' and then a second migration which covers the remaining two weeks between the initial migration and the cut-off date.