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Training: Programs & Categories
This guide covers the course catalog — the programs the company offers and the categories they're grouped into.
Purpose
This answers the question a requester and a scheduler both start from: "What training do we actually offer?"
The catalog is the shared reference point. A request can point at a program instead of describing a course in free text, a session inherits its title from one, and evaluation results are averaged per program — so the same course delivered four times over a year reads as one trend rather than four unrelated events.
Programs
A program is a course in the catalog. It carries:
- A title and a description.
- A category — optional, but it's what makes a long catalog browsable.
- A delivery mode — In House, External, or Online.
- A duration in hours — indicative, for planning.
- A default cost — the indicative price of running or buying it, used as a guide when a request or a session is costed.
- Objectives — what someone should be able to do afterwards.
Programs are found under Training → Programs, which can be viewed as a list or as cards, filtered, grouped, and searched.
A program is not mandatory. A one-off course nobody expects to repeat can be requested or scheduled as free text, without adding it to the catalog first.
Categories
A category is a simple label with a title — "Compliance", "Technical", "Leadership", "Health & Safety". Programs point at one, and the catalog can then be filtered and grouped by it.
Categories are managed under Settings → Training → Training Categories.
A category that's in use by a program can't be deleted. Retire the programs first, or leave the category in place.
What Each User Sees
| Action | Employee | Reporting Manager | HR Administrator |
|---|---|---|---|
| Browse the program catalog | — | ✅ | ✅ |
| Open a program's detail page | — | ✅ | ✅ |
| Create, edit, or delete a program | — | — | ✅ |
| See the category list | — | — | ✅ |
| Create, edit, or delete a category | — | — | ✅ |
Employees don't browse the catalog directly. They meet it on the request form, where the program dropdown lists what's available.
How Visibility Is Decided
- The reporting line. A reporting manager can browse the catalog and open any program, without holding a training permission. This is deliberate: a manager deciding a team member's request needs to see what the course is, what it costs, and what it's meant to achieve.
- Permissions. Creating, editing, and deleting a program each need their own permission, and being a manager grants none of them. Categories are permission-only throughout, including viewing the list — they're managed under Settings, not from the Training menu.
- Company. A program or category belongs to the company selected when it was created, and appears only under that company.
Good to Know
- Default cost is a guide, not a control. It doesn't pre-fill or cap what a request or a session is costed at; the real figure is entered on each.
- Duration is informational too. A session's real length comes from its start and end times, not from the program.
- Category titles are unique across the catalog.
- Deleting is blocked, not cascading. A category in use by a program is protected, so removing it can never silently strip the grouping off live programs. The same holds one level down: a program already referenced by a request or a session can't be deleted either.