Audience: This document will be of special interest to system administrators and managers who will oversee the setup and management of the Skills Manager application, however all users will gain a better understanding of Skills Manager after reading it.

Skills Manager enables you to construct a course catalog to both define and organize all courses that personnel will attend. The course catalog can be simple or complex depending on the needs of your organization. The catalog is one of the fundamental building blocks on which you will build your Skills Manager database. A little planning is suggested before you begin constructing your course catalog.

We recommend beginning with a simple catalog and then implementing the more advanced features as you find that they benefit your organization. It wouldn’t be prudent to put forth the additional effort required by the advanced features while their usefulness is undetermined. Of course, you may be converting to Skills Manager from a pre-existing software application that has a well-developed course catalog, in which case you might make immediate use of the advanced features.

At a minimum, the course catalog will consist of course numbers and their related descriptions. This may be all that a small organization needs to begin operations. However, even small organizations can find value in the advanced features.

Course Identification Numbers (Course Id) must be unique and cannot be repeated in the course catalog. Organizations may take various approaches to assigning these identifiers.

I have seen organizations assign a unique number to every new course as it is approved as well as when the lesson plan or content of an existing course changes. In doing this, they can always identify precisely the training that was delivered and back it up with documentation when asked to do so in courtroom situations. Obviously, one can go through quite a few course numbers using this technique and you can easily end up with hundreds or even thousands of courses in the catalog after a period of time. Another advantage to numbering courses this way is that if you ever need to know who attended a specific course, you can simply run a report and filter on the course number.

Other organizations use the same course numbers year after year. This requires less effort and the course catalog stays fairly compact. But, a real disadvantage to this method is that it is hard to substantiate the precise training that was provided in courtroom situations if that becomes necessary. Another small disadvantage is that when reporting on individual courses, you may need to supply values in both the course and date filters to determine who attended a specific course. This is because the database will contain many individuals who attended the same course over many years.

Which method is best for you? You will need to evaluate your current policies and procedures as well as staffing. We are always in favor of capturing as much data as possible, if you have the resources to do so.

Nearly every organization that provides training has a process where lesson plans, course content, objectives, and instructors are reviewed, evaluated, and approved. A unique identifier or course number is typically assigned to every approved course offered through their organization. But what about training that employees receive via external organizations? Perhaps you want to give employees credit for the hours they invest in attending such courses but you do not want to add hundreds of additional courses to your course catalog, especially when such courses may be referenced just once or twice. 

How can this data be tracked efficiently? Skills Manager solves this problem with the "ad-hoc course". An ad-hoc course is added to your Course Catalog automatically by the software and it is identified by a course i.d. beginning with the characters "MISC". This value is reserved by Skills Manager and should not be used when defining your own approved courses.

When entering ad-hoc or external training into Skills Manager you should consider using the ad-hoc course i.d. When you do, you are prompted to enter an ad-hoc course title into the training record. Such training records do not derive the course name from the course catalog, but from the course title you supply in the training record. This ad-hoc information is displayed on all relevant training forms and reports.

If your course catalog will exceed 100 courses, it would be wise to consider organizing the courses topically using programs and subjects. As with most large groups of objects, grouping your courses will make them much easier to manage.

You can use programs alone to divide your catalog into one-dimensional categories, or you can use subjects in addition to divide each program into smaller sub-categories, making your catalog two-dimensional.

Programs and subjects make large catalogs much easier to work with. Some organizations have thousands of courses in their catalogs. Using programs and subjects, they can easily print just a segment of their catalog and they are able to access individual courses or groups of courses more quickly. Reporting on various types of training (such as entry level, in-service, supervisor, administrator, or instructor) is also simpler when you use the report filters to select specific programs and/or subjects.

Classes enable you to track specific instances of a course. For example, an "Arrest Techniques" course (or lesson plan) may be offered multiple times, perhaps on different dates, at various locations and with different instructors. Assigning a class code to each instance will allow you to track personnel who attended a distinct class..

For example, think of a multi-campus community college. The college may offer English 101 at 2pm on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and at 6pm on Tuesday & Thursday at the main campus and at 11am Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at a satellite campus. The general course is assigned a unique number and then each instance of the course is assigned a section (or class) number. Using this numbering scheme the college can track enrollment and attendance for each class.

Skills Manager uses courses and classes in the same way. When you use classes to further describe each course you will be able to assign unique dates, times, instructors and locations to every individual class. Class identifiers must be unique within each course, however the same numbers can  be reused under separate courses.  For example, course A301 can have classes 1, 2,  3, and so can course A402.

Skills Manager provides extensive handling of instructors and locations.  Although both of these elements are included in the course and class tables, they reach into many parts of Skills Manager.  A clear and complete description of these capabilities would require considerable explanation.  For the sake of remaining focused on the course catalog, we will not take the space in this document to accomplish this but we will dedicate a bulletin specifically to instructors at a later date.

The course catalog contained in Skills Manager is quite flexible. With it, you can deploy a simple course list or a comprehensive catalog. Before you get started defining your course catalog, take some time to review the one included in the sample data set provided with Skills Manager, and take a look at the sample catalog structure provided below to get a few ideas. The Crown Pointe staff will also be happy to consult with you and review your design before you implement this critical piece in Skills Manager. Our advice, based on experiences with other customers and our familiarity with Skills Manager, might provide that bit of reassurance you need.  You might be right on-track or we might make a few helpful suggestions that will improve your design.

If, after using Skills Manager for a while, you determine it would be beneficial to restructure your course catalog to make it more efficient or take advantage of additional feature(s) in Skills Manager, it might be possible to for us to develop customized software to quickly and accurately make this transition in your database without a huge data entry effort involving your staff. Please give us a call!

by Steve Wesner

Crown Pointe Technologies, Inc.

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• Corrections (program)
  • Entry Level (subject)
    • Correctional Officer ELT (course)
      • Session #1 - 1999 (class)
      • Session #2 - 2000
      • Session #3 - 2001
  • Administrator
    • First Line Corrections Administrator
  • Firearms
    • Annual Firearms – Glock
    • Annual Firearms – Shotgun
  • In-Service
    • Administering Medications
  • Instructor
    • Basic Instructor
    • Firearms Instructor
  • Supervisor
    • First Line Corrections Supervisor
• Police
  • Entry Level
    • Police Officer ELT
      • Class #1 - 1999
      • Class #2 - 1999
      • Class #3 - 2000
    • Police Officer ELT (1999-2)
    • Police Officer ELT (2000-1)
  • Administrator
    • First Line Police Administrator
  • Firearms
    • Annual Firearms – Glock
    • Annual Firearms – Shotgun
    • Annual Firearms - Lowlight
  • In-Service
    • Accident Investigation
  • Instructor
    • Basic Instructor
    • Firearms Instructor
  • Supervisor
    • First Line Corrections Supervisor

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