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Training: Sessions & Attendance
This guide covers scheduling a training session, managing its roster, and recording what happened — attendance, completion, scores, and certificates.
Purpose
A session is the actual delivery: this course, on this date, by this trainer, to these people, at this cost. Everything the company can later prove about who was trained comes from here.
Scheduling a Session
A session is created from Training → Sessions, or pre-filled from an approved request (see Training Requests). It carries:
- A title, and optionally the program it delivers.
- A trainer — internal or external.
- A description.
- Start and end date/time. The end must be after the start.
- A mode — In Person, Online, or Hybrid.
- A venue, required for In Person and Hybrid.
- A meeting link, required for Online and Hybrid.
- Max participants — a planning figure. Going over it is allowed, and warned about.
- The cost of running it.
- An evaluation template and an evaluation due date — both optional here; if left empty, the company's defaults are applied when the session is completed.
- The attendees.
Everyone added to the roster is notified that they've been scheduled.
Session Status
| Status | What it means | How it gets there |
|---|---|---|
| Planned | Scheduled, not yet run. This is where every session starts. | On creation. |
| Ongoing | Under way. | Automatic — the system moves a planned session here once its start time has passed. |
| Completed | Delivered. Marking a session complete is what opens its evaluations. | Marked by hand. |
| Cancelled | Called off. A cancelled session stops counting towards budget spend. | Marked by hand. |
Planned → Ongoing happens on its own. Within a few minutes of a session's start time, its status changes without anyone touching it. Nothing else follows from the change — no notification is sent, and no evaluation opens — so a session that was quietly abandoned simply sits at Ongoing until somebody cancels it.
Ongoing → Completed does not. Completion is what opens the evaluation window and asks every attendee for feedback, so it waits for a person to say the session really was delivered. A session whose end time has passed stays Ongoing until then.
A completed session can't be cancelled, and a cancelled one can't be completed. A cancelled session is never started automatically either. Cancelling notifies everyone on the roster.
Managing the Roster
Attendees are edited on the session form, as a multi-select of employees. Saving reconciles the roster against what's selected:
- Anyone newly selected is added and notified.
- Anyone removed from the selection is dropped — unless their attendance has already been marked, or they've already submitted an evaluation. Those are historical facts, and a roster edit won't erase them.
To remove somebody whose attendance is already marked, use the explicit remove action against them on the session detail page.
Editing a session also notifies everyone currently on the roster that it changed.
Marking Attendance
From the session detail page, Attendance opens the roster with a status against each person:
| Attendance | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Pending | Not yet marked. Every attendee starts here. |
| Attended | Turned up. |
| Absent | Didn't turn up. |
| Excused | Didn't turn up, with a reason accepted. |
The whole roster is marked in one save, which is how it's usually done — straight off the register at the end of the day.
Recording Completion
Attendance is "were they there"; completion is "did they get through it". Each attendee record additionally carries:
- A completion status — Not Started, In Progress, Completed, or Failed.
- A score, where the training was assessed.
- Remarks.
- A certificate file.
Employees see all of this — including the certificate, downloadable — on their own My Trainings page.
My Trainings
Training → My Trainings is the employee's own record:
- Evaluations awaiting you — sessions you attended that are still open for feedback, with their due dates.
- Training history — every session you were on, with its date, your attendance, your completion status, your score, and your certificate.
- My requests — the requests you've raised and where they stand.
What Each User Sees
| Action | Employee | Reporting Manager | HR Administrator |
|---|---|---|---|
| Browse the session list | — | ✅ | ✅ |
| Open a session they are on the roster for | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Open any session, whoever is on it | — | ✅ | ✅ |
| See a session's roster | ✅ (their own sessions) | ✅ | ✅ |
| See a session's cost | — | — | ✅ |
| See their own attendance, score, and certificate | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Create or edit a session | — | — | ✅ |
| Add or remove attendees | — | — | ✅ |
| Cancel or complete a session | — | — | ✅ |
| Mark attendance | — | — | ✅ |
| Record completion, scores, and certificates | — | — | ✅ |
| Delete a session | — | — | ✅ |
How Visibility Is Decided
- Being on the roster. An attendee can open their own session's detail page, and see who else is on it. This is what My Trainings and the scheduling notifications link to, so it has to open for them.
- The reporting line. A reporting manager can browse the whole session list and open any session, without needing a training permission.
- Permissions. The session-view permission is what shows the cost — on the list, in the grouped view, and on the detail page. Creating, editing, cancelling, completing, and deleting a session each need their own permission, as does marking attendance and completion.
- Company. A session belongs to the company selected when it was created, and appears only under that company.
An employee who is neither an attendee nor a manager has no session list at all: the Sessions menu entry takes them to My Trainings, where the sessions they are actually booked on are listed.
Good to Know
- Max participants is a planning figure, not a limit. More people can be added to the roster than it allows: the save goes through, a warning says how many places over it is, and the session detail page carries an over-capacity badge until the roster or the figure changes. Rooms take an extra chair and people drop out, so the cap informs the scheduler rather than overruling them.
- A person can only be on a session once. Adding somebody twice isn't possible.
- Attendance drives evaluation. Only people marked Attended are asked for feedback and allowed to submit it, so leaving a roster on Pending means no evaluations at all.
- Marking complete is a deliberate act. A session starts itself, but it doesn't complete itself when its end time passes — somebody marks it, and that's what opens the evaluation window and notifies attendees.
- Cost is per session, not per head. For budget purposes it's divided across the attendees — see Budgets & Settings.