Assignment Rules
Assignment rules are useful when you need an automatic way to detect when an employee needs to take a certain course. Below are some examples of situations in which assignment rules are useful:
- A certain course needs to be retaken every 12 months. An assignment rule can be used to detect when it is time for a particular employee to retake the course.
- A set of employees needs to take a particular course. However, some of them have taken the course already. An assignment rule is able to check for a prior completion and assign the course only if the employee has not completed it before (or within a specified time period).
There are two methods for defining a set of employees: Search Criteria or Employee Group.
When using the Search Criteria method, you describe the employees based on information from Workday, such as an employee’s:
- TAMUS Member;
- ADLOC;
- Title Code
- EEO job category (Clerical, Executive/Admin/Mgr, Faculty, Professional Non-Faculty, Service/Maintenance, Skilled Craft, or Technical/Paraprofessional);
- Faculty rank (Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Professor, Lecturer, Instructor, Graduate Assistant, Staff, or Student); and/or
- FLSA status (Administrative-exempt, Executive-exempt, Non-exempt, Partially-exempt, Professional-exempt)
When using the Employee Group method, the employees are assigned based on a list that you manually create using the Employee Groups function in TrainTraq.
In general, it is better to use Search Criteria if possible, because if an employee no longer meets one of the criteria to receive an assignment for a particular course, TrainTraq will not make the assignment to that employee.
In contrast, if you use the Employee Group method to, for example, assign an employee to take a lab safety course—and then the employee no longer works in a lab and you don’t remember to remove him from the group—the employee will continue to receive assignments to take the course even though he no longer works in a lab. Similarly, if a new employee starts working in a lab and you forget to add him to the lab safety training group, TrainTraq will not know that he needs to receive an assignment.
However, sometimes it is impossible to use search criteria to identify employees who need a certain type of training, so you have to use an Employee Group instead. If you use an Employee Group, you will need to develop a process for periodically reviewing and updating the group members.
Employee Group Assignments
The Employee Group Assignments page allows you to assign courses, programs, and tasks to all employees in a selected employee group.
When you use the Group Assignments function, TrainTraq assumes that you want every employee currently in the group to receive an assignment regardless of when an employee last completed the course, program, or task to be assigned. Therefore, you should carefully review the list of employees currently in the group to ensure that the list is accurate and up-to-date. If you want TrainTraq to take the most recent completion date into consideration, you need to work your Training Coordinator to develop an assignment rule. Assignments made to employee groups from the Employee Group Assignments page are one-time assignments and do not automatically reoccur.