Skills Manager is a comprehensive and flexible software application. In as much as it meets the need for tracking officer training and firearm compliance with Maryland standards and reporting training and firearms to the MPCTC, it also provides many additional features that agencies find valuable for collecting and managing other data about their employees. This additional data may not be reported to, or used by the MPCTC.

Perhaps your agency tracks the activities of civilian employees in addition to law enforcement personnel. Maybe your organization offers training courses that are not approved by MPCTC, but which are equally important to your organization.  Perhaps your agency has additional certifications that it grants to qualified individuals.

Many of the lookup tables can be safely customized to fit a specific agency's needs, however caution must be exercised so that those tables used to determine training and firearm compliance with Maryland police and correctional standards are not compromised.

Which lookup tables can be customized for individual agency use?

The content of some lookup tables is set by the MPCTC and changes to those tables are prohibited. Any changes to those tables which are not approved by the MPCTC may compromise your agency's ability to report training and firearms records to the MPCTC electronically and may disable the custom compliance reports. The Employment Action lookup table falls into this category.

Some lookup tables can be used jointly by the Training Commissions and your agency. Standard entries set by the Training Commissions should not be changed or deleted, however it is possible to make additional entries for individual agency use. The Certificate lookup table falls into this category.

Some lookup tables are not used by the Training Commissions and individual agencies have complete liberty to add, change, and delete entries in these tables. The Employee Type and Employment Assignment lookup tables fall into this category.

Courses

When adding courses that are not approved by the MPCTC to your course catalog it is critical that you assign a program other than "P"olice, "C"orrections, and "E"xecutive to these courses. You will find these three entries defined in the Program lookup table in your Skills Manager database.  These programs are reserved for courses that qualify for annual in-service requirements set by the MPCTC.

The MPCTC numbers approved courses sequentially, for example P####, C####, E####, where #### is a unique and incremental course number. Course id's beginning with "P" are police courses, those beginning with "C" are corrections courses, and those beginning with "E" are executive development courses. When adding courses that are not approved by the MPCTC, it is important that you avoid using course id's that begin with these special characters. The MPCTC will be adding thousands of additional courses in the future and you do not want to use course id's that will conflict with their numbering scheme.

Certifications

You can also establish agency specific certifications. The certifications monitored by MPCTC include "P"olice Officer, "C"orrections Officer, and a variety of instructor certificates. Take care not to interfere with the certificates defined by MPCTC.

Attributes

You might also consider using Attributes to tack specific skills that do not involve certification. You could create an Attribute Topic labeled "Skills" and then create any number of individual skills under this topic. Attributes can be used as filters when reporting just as certificates and courses can.