Home | Products | Support | Services | News | Contact | Company

(August 18, 2001)

Defining Instructors

Instructors are typically experienced or expert personnel who are approved or perhaps even certified to teach other personnel. Instructors may be approved to teach courses dealing with very specific subjects or they may be approved to teach courses on many subjects. Instructors may be employed by your organization or they may work for other public safety, commercial, or educational organizations.

Instructors who are employed by your organization will be recorded in your employee table. Instructors who are employed by other organizations can also be recorded in your employee table, or they may be noted in an ad-hoc manner when recording employee training. (Ad-hoc instructors will be addressed later in this document.)

Identifying Instructors

Skills Manager does not use a separate "instructor" table to record basic instructor information such as name, identification number, address, telephone, and so on. This is because most of your instructors are likely to be employees and thus will already be defined in your employee table. Having an additional instructor table would be redundant and would require that you maintain similar data (names, addresses, phone numbers, email, etc.) in multiple tables.

The simplest way to identify instructors in Skills Manager is to check the  Instructor checkbox on the Employee Entry form. If the instructor is also an employee then the Employee checkbox should also be checked. These checkboxes also appear as filters on the Browse Employees form where they can be used to list just instructors when viewing the employee table. The checkboxes also appear as filters in the Reporter where they can be used to report on specific personnel.

Although these checkboxes are very easy to implement, they provide little information about your instructors. For example, they do not identify the type of instructor, or when the instructor was certified, or more importantly when their service as an instructor will end. To accomplish such things you must use additional Skills Manager features.

Certifying Instructors

The certification history table can track various employee certifications and it is the perfect location to record instructor certifications as well.  Using the various certification lookup tables (Certificate, Type, Level, and Status) you can effectively describe characteristics for a variety of instructor certificates in great detail.

As mentioned earlier, most instructors are experienced employees who have demonstrated outstanding knowledge in their areas of expertise.  They may have completed special training and perhaps they have been certified to instruct particular topics or courses.  The certification history can be used to record many certificates for a given employee and to track changes in the characteristics of a certificate as it changes over time.

Instructors might be certified for a fixed period of time, say 2 or 3 years.  Every certificate has a Certification Date (start) and an Expiration Date (end) for defining the effective period of the certificate.  A Probation Date is even provided for certificates having a probationary period.  The status field can be used in conjunction with these dates to indicate whether a certificate is active or inactive.

Filters are provided in the Reporter for all certification fields allowing you to select instructors for reports in numerous ways.  Perhaps you will want a roster of all instructors, or more specifically all driving instructors, or all instructors at a particular location.  You may want to limit the list to active instructors only, or to instructors whose certificates are due to expire in the next 90 days.  Perhaps you will want more than a simple roster and would like to also see the instructor's certificates and training attended by the instructor in complete detail.  The reporter is very powerful and flexible and it provides extensive reporting capabilities such as those mentioned here and more.

Course / Instructor Pool

There may be times, when working with a specific instructor, you will want to know which courses the instructor is qualified to teach.  Or, when working with a particular course, you will want to know which instructors are qualified to teach that course.  Skills Manager has a feature named the Course / Instructor Pool to provide this function.

The Course / Instructor Pool is accessible both from the Employee record and the Course record.  When accessing the pool from the employee record, you can enter or view all courses that an instructor is qualified to teach.  When accessing the pool from the course record, you can enter or view all instructors that are qualified to teach the course.  The data recorded in this table has bi-directional access, meaning that when it is entered from one location (employee or course) it is automatically accessible from the opposite location.

Assigning Instructors to Courses/Classes

When entering courses and classes into your course catalog, Skills Manager also makes it possible to associate an instructor with each course and/or class.  These instructors serve as the default instructor values that are placed into employee training records automatically as they are recorded in the training history table.  The instructor then becomes part of the historical training record and is displayed whenever an employee's training history is viewed.

Skills Manager provides two ways to indicate who the instructor is, as you will see in the sample course form displayed below.

1. If the instructor is defined in your employee table, you would enter the appropriate identification number into the Instructor Id field thereby creating a link with the employee record.  (You can control which identification will be used to create the association via the Skills Manager Setup form.  The choices are Social Security, Alternate Id #1, or Alternate Id# 2).

2. If the instructor is not defined in your employee table, you would enter the undefined instructor's name into the text field provided.  This method of recording instructors does not provide all of the functionality that you get with a defined instructor.  Basically, it provides a record of who the instructor is but it cannot be used in queries or report filters as with the first method.

Some organizations choose to implement only the course portion of the course catalog forgoing the use of classes to keep things simple while others use both courses and classes.  Whichever the case, Skills Manager will use the instructor id's to the extent that you have implemented them on the Instructor / Sponsor tab in the course catalog.

For example, when adding a training record for an employee, Skills Manager will use either the course id or the class id to automatically retrieve the relevant Instructor, Sponsor, and Training Location and place them in the training record for you.  When you enter a course id the course record is retrieved and (if present) the appropriate values are entered into the training record.  When you enter a class id the class record is retrieved and (if present) the appropriate values are entered into the training record.  You can, of course, override any of the defaults values that are placed in the training record.

Tracking Hours of Instruction

Some organizations track the number of hours that instructors actually instruct during a specific period of time.  Instructors may have to accumulate a minimum number of hours of instructions to retain their instructor certification.  Skills Manager can help you track actual instructor hours.

The training history table is typically used to record employee training activities.  The status field on the training record is most frequently used to reflect enrollment, wait list, pass, fail, complete (all statuses associated with attending a course). The "instructed" status is provided to help you track hours of instruction.

By entering a record into an instructor's training history and setting the status to "instructed" you essentially record the fact that this employee provided the instruction.  Other important data elements are also represented including the course id, date, and number of hours.

Whenever training reports are produced, the status is printed so that you will clearly see those courses an employee attended as a student and those they instructed.  In fact, all reports that show employee training allow you to filter on training status so that you can filter out courses attended and show only courses instructed if so desired.