What is the difference between Attendance and Completion?

This article describes what the difference is between Attendance records, and Training Completion records. This is an important concept to understand - so you can ensure you are keeping the kind of training records that matter to your organisation.

Many training courses and events are just Attendance based - meaning that a person just has to show up, and that will be enough. However, in organisations that do any kind of assessments or have any other criteria in addition to just showing up, you would want to differentiate between someone who has Attended an event, and someone who has completed all of the criteria for a particular Training Level.

So for example, imagine a rescue team that has a Qualification called "Basic Rescue Technician". And that to get that qualification, a team member must complete a few different criteria, such as:

Attend a Basic Rescue course
Pass a written exam
Pass a practical assessment

So clearly in this case, just showing up to the course isn't enough on it's own - the person must also achieve two other criteria in addition to successful completion of the course. In ITM, these criteria would be entered as 3 seperate Learning Objectives, and added to a Training Level called "Basic Rescue Technician".

Once a Training Manager has determined that a student has completed each of these 3 criteria, he or she can "Sign Off" these Learning Objectives for that team member. Once all 3 are complete, the Training Manager can "Sign Off" that the Qualification as a whole has been achieved by the team member.

This "Sign Off" is called a Training Completion record. As you can see, it's more significant than a simple Attendance record because it denotes that certain criteria were achieved by the team member.

Note that Training Completions can be for Learning Objectives or for Training Levels (which include Courses and Qualifications). So in our example, the team member gained 3 Completions (or "sign-off's") for the individual Learning Objectives, and then one Completion for the Qualification.

Related Articles:
What is a Training Level?