Automatic Membership for Training Groups

If you have a large number of learners, you may find that managing their group memberships can take a lot of time. The Automatic Membership system for Training Groups allows you to define specific attendance or completion criteria, and let the system automatically add people who match these criteria.

Before proceeding, make sure you are familiar with the concept of Training Groups, and also the difference between Attendance and Completion.

To add or remove Contacts from a Training Group directly, you can use the Manual Membership feature - giving you complete control over who belongs to each Group. However, if your organisation has certain rules for who should be in each Training Group, you may prefer to configure the Automatic Membership criteria and let the system manage the membership for you. In both cases, you access these features from the 'Group Members' mode of the Training Group you are interested in.

For automatic membership, a contact must meet all of the specified Attendance and Completion criteria, and belong to any of the Contact States that you have specified. The system processes the criteria once a day, so anyone who has recently met all the criteria will be automatically added to the Group within 24 hours.

If you do not specify a particular criteria (for example, you leave the Contact Status criteria blank), then it will not apply (so in this example, it would not matter what Contact Status a person has).

Note that the automatic membership system only ever adds people to Training Groups. It does not remove them. This allows you to manually add additional people that do not match all the necessary criteria, but nevertheless should be in the group.

Let's work through a couple of examples so you can see how this works. For these examples, let's imagine you are part of a Search & Rescue organisation ("SAR-1") that recruits new volunteers each year. Also, some volunteers will go on to become Search Managers after passing various courses & evaluations.

Example 1 - Recruits becoming operational technicians
Each year SAR-1 recruits 30 new volunteers. Once these people have attended both the Search & Rescue Basics training course, and one Mock Search, they are considered operational members. You want to be able to easily find all the active, operational members in ITM.

Suggested Configuration:
You would create a Training Group called "Operational Volunteers", and add an Attendance criteria for the "Search & Rescue Basics" training course, and another for "Mock Search" (these need to already exist in your Syllabus). You would also add a Contact Status criteria of "Active Member", to ensure that people who have previously left the organisation are not added.

This configuration ensures that only people who have confirmed attendance at both the training course and the mock search are added, and only if they are an Active Member.

Example 2 - Technicians become Search Managers
Each year a small number of operational volunteers go on to become Search Managers. This designation requires the volunteer to complete & pass the Search Managers training course, and to pass an evaluation while managing a mock search. You want to be able to easily find all the active, Search Managers members in ITM.

Suggested Configuration:
You would create a Training Group called "Search Managers", and add a Completion criteria for the "Search Managers" training course, and another for "Mock Search Evaluation" (these items need to already exist in your Syllabus). You would also add a Contact Status criteria of "Active Member", to ensure that people who have previously left the organisation are not added.

This configuration ensures that only people who have successfully passed both the training course and the mock search evaluation are added, and only if they are an Active Member.

Example 3 - Existing member is a Search Manager
One of the senior Search Managers for SAR-1 is "Bob Hunt". Bob did his Search Managers training over 20 years ago, which is before the start of the training records that SAR-1 have entered in ITM. It is also before the requirement for a mock search evaluation was instituted. It's important that Bob is included in the list of Search Managers, as he has managed hundreds of searches in his time.

Suggested Configuration:
You have two choices.

You can use the Recognition Of Learning feature to add the details of the Search Managers qualification that Bob achieved 20 years ago, and also add an "RPL" (Recognition of Prior Learning) to cover off the requirement for a mock search evaluation. Within 24 hours, Bob will be added to the "Search Managers" Training Group.

Alternatively you can manually add Bob to the "Search Managers" Training Group. Because the automatic membership feature only adds people, and does not remove anyone, Bob will remain a member of the Group after automatic processing.