Academy - External Training - How to Guide

This article applies to:
PoliceOne Academy, FireRescue1 Academy, CorrectionsOne Academy, EMS1 Academy, LocalGovU, and white-label sites

The External Training feature allows you to record training that happens outside of Academy, and include those completions in Academy reports/dashboards. With this feature, you can now centralize your records and easily produce reports for all of your training in one place, which is very helpful during an audit.

The External Training feature works in conjunction with our Code Manager and code-based Learning Plans, so that if people log training using codes, the completions can automatically count towards those assignments (without manually adding the course/activity in the learning plan). You can talk to your Customer Service Manager about setting training codes and code-based requirements so that you can get the most out of the External Training feature.

Permissions: Who can record and manage External Training?

The default setting is that only org admins can create activities record external training. However, there are several other options that can be set to allow others to report training without giving them full org admin rights:

• Grant non-admins the Manage External Training permission through Roles which allows them to create external training course/activities and manage completions: report, edit, delete approve and reject the training.
• Grant users the Record External Training permission through Roles. They will not be able to create activities, edit or delete recorded training, nor view items that are recorded by/for other people. We recently limited who can create activities to those who can manage the training to help prevent record duplication.
• Allow all end users in the org to self-report training by checking the option in the back end (contact your Customer Service Manager).

Note: if a user is granted permission to report external training but he is a group owner (in Groups) it allows him to report training only for group members.

How to Record External Training

1. On the Training menu, select External Training from the drop down menu. You will see all existing external training records for the organization here. To report a new training session, go to Report Training.
2. Enter training date/time, location, and content details:
   1. Training Dates: training can only happen in the past. End date is required.
   2. Training location: you can select from an existing location or enter a new one. If the training happened online, you can check the “Online” box and enter the course URL.
   3. Training Type: there are several options to choose from. One of the recent updates is that the user can now enter custom types on the front end through the “Manage Types” link.
   4. Course/Activity this is what members train on.
      1. Admins or those with permission to manage external training can create a new activity/course as they are reporting the training. It's also possible for to create an external training course before logging the training through the Custom Courses Tool (Admin menu). Every new activity created will be automatically saved for future use.
      2. Users without the manager permission can record the training by selecting an existing activity/course in this form. An "Other" course can be used for one-off training, and details provided in the description field.
   5. Training Codes (optional): you can add training codes to a course/activity as you are logging the training, or at any time by searching for the course “Course Codes” tab in the Code Manager tool (Admins). In addition to all the benefits previously mentioned, codes allow users to quickly categorize and provide more details about what was covered the training session (most users don’t provide enough detail on the description field). Note that if you select an existing course that has been previously coded, those codes will appear in the External Training form as you are recording the training, but can be deleted or augmented to match what was covered in that particular session.
   6. Training Description: can be used to provide detailed information on the scope of the training.
   7. Credit: can be entered in hours or minutes 
3. Enter trainee and instructor information. Add files (optional)
   1. Trainees: users can record training for themselves or others based on permissions granted (refer to the “Who can record and manage External Training?” section above).
   2. Instructors: allows you to select anyone in the organization so you can document who conducted the training session, as well as the time spent. You can add yourself as an Instructor with one click.
   3. Files: users can upload pictures and other documents to provide more detail about the training.
4. Save the form. If the user recording the training is not an Admin or Training Manager, the record will be saved with a status of “New” and be reviewed and approved by an Admin. Training reported by Admins will be automatically "Approved."

How to Manage Reported External Training

• On the Training menu select External Training from the drop down menu. You will see all existing external training records for the organization there.

• Admins/Managers can search for any record and then approve, reject, edit or delete the training. Note that there are currently no notifications for this feature so users will need to review this dashboard periodically and search for "new" status records to approve. To narrow down the search, the latest completions are displayed at the top of the page, and records can be filtered by multiple criteria like course name, member, approval status, type, location, and training code.

Reports for External Training

Users with access to reports will be able to see external training completions there. Any course completions report will include external training activities, classified as course type "External Training." Members, ISO Assigned completions, Courses, Groups, and Course Type reports are available to org admins. The State Accreditation and Course Completions reports also include external training; these reports are available for site admins.

The reports include classifier and training code information. You can choose whether this data is merged or separated into columns.