You don’t have to give up your training goals when work gets hectic
Training Plans are powerful tools for learners and managers alike. With a Training Plan, you assign training to yourself or others and set a due date based on your weekly time commitment. If you are unusually busy one week and can’t manage enough training hours, that’s no problem. You can always make up the time the next week, just so long as you finish all the content by the due date. The scheduling tools and reminders in the Training Plan make it easy to see at a glance whether you are on pace to accomplish your training goal by the due date.
What happens, though, if that unusually busy week is the last week of the Training Plan, and you miss the due date? Previously, the system would simply change the status of the Training Plan to expired and stop tracking your progress through the materials. The Training Plan would appear on your dashboard but without the Resume button. After all, the past is in the past, and tomorrow is another day. You wouldn’t want to delay starting your next Training Plan just because you got behind on this one.
Giving up and moving on can be pretty frustrating, though. You still want credit for the hard work you put in, both for your own sense of accomplishment and to give your manager an accurate picture of the skills you’ve acquired. You were a day or two late finishing a Training Plan, but that doesn’t mean you didn’t master the skills!
A new approach to due dates
We realized that the Training Plan needed to accommodate those times when urgent work gets in the way of training time. That’s why we’re announcing that Training Plans can now stay active after the due date.
With this change, the Training Plan remains active until you finish it, or until the manager who assigned it decides to archive it. The Training Plan continues to appear with the Resume button on your dashboard, and your manager can keep monitoring your progress through the content on the management dashboard and in reports.
One of the best parts is that the next Training Plan does not have to wait until this one is complete. If you have a queue of Training Plans, the next one simply starts on its scheduled start date and runs in parallel to the old Training Plan. This gives you the chance to put in a little extra effort and catch up. It removes the penalty that you used to pay if a heavy week at work happened to coincide with the last week of a Training Plan.
Important: Your existing Training Plans will be migrated to use this new due date approach to avoid a confusing mix of new and old approaches during the transition.
What if I liked it the way it was?
There’s good news for you, too. Managers can choose to keep the previous expiration behavior on a Training Plan-by-Training Plan basis.
The Settings tab on the Training Plan gives you the new option to Force Training Plan expiration. By default this option is off, but if you decide to enable it, the system goes back to working the way it did before. When the due date passes, the Training Plan expires and the management dashboard and reports do not reflect any more progress on the content.
Tip: You can change this setting after the Training Plan is already expired in case you want it to disappear from the dashboards of learners who haven’t finished it.
What we’re all about
At Cloud Academy, we are focused on delivering innovative, enterprise-ready training technology that enables organizations to continuously improve the way they do business. Expect Cloud Academy to continue to deliver easy ways to motivate your teams within the context of your enterprise systems and processes.
If you aren’t already on this journey to deliver technology training in an effective way, we hope you join us.
For those on the journey with us, thank you. If you have questions about Training Plans, please speak with your Customer Success Manager.
