Setup Considerations: mandatory learning

What this achieves

Mandatory learning is defined by rule rather than assigned person by person, so the audience is worked out from who people are instead of from a list somebody maintains. Getting the rules right is what makes a compliance figure mean something.

Decision 1: rules, or assignment

Most training is assigned. Compliance training is different in kind, and the difference decides which tool you use.

Option	Description
A mandatory rule	The audience is derived from a scope, and new joiners who match are picked up when the rules are enforced. The question it answers is who has not completed.
Enrolling learners directly	You choose the people. Nothing is inferred, and nobody is added later.

The test is whether you can state who needs the training without naming anyone. “Everyone in Operations” is a rule; “these fourteen people” is an assignment.

Example: annual security training for everyone at HC Corp UK Ltd is a rule. A course for the six people rolling out a new system is an assignment.

Decision 2: how narrow the scope should be

A rule targets one scope, and the choice decides both who is reached now and who is picked up in future.

Option	Description
All Employees	Everyone. The right answer for genuinely universal training.
By Department	Everyone in a named department.
By Job Profile	Everyone holding a named profile. Follows the work rather than the reporting line.
By Grade	Everyone at a named grade.
By Business Unit	Everyone in a named unit.

Prefer the scope that describes why the training is needed. Where the reason is the work somebody does, job profile survives reorganisations that department does not.

Example: handling training required by a warehouse role at HC Corp UK Ltd is better scoped by job profile than by department, because moving the team under a different department would silently drop them from a department-scoped rule.

The form previews how many employees a rule will apply to before you save it, and can show a sample of who they are. Treat a count that surprises you as a wrong scope rather than a surprising organization.

Decision 3: a course or a learning path

A rule targets either a single course or a whole path. A path is the right target where compliance genuinely means several pieces of training, because one rule then tracks the whole obligation rather than three rules tracking parts of it.

Decision 4: what the deadline is measured from

The deadline is a number of days from enrollment, not a fixed date in the calendar. Everybody therefore gets the same amount of time, and a new joiner’s clock starts when the rule reaches them.

That is usually what compliance training means, and it is not what people expect if they were thinking of a year-end date. A rule with a thirty-day deadline gives a January joiner until February and a September joiner until October.

Example: a thirty-day deadline on induction training at HC Corp UK Ltd means each new starter has their own month, which is the sensible reading. The same setting on training everyone must finish before a fixed audit date is not, because nobody’s deadline lines up with the audit.

Decision 5: recurrence

A rule can recur after a number of months, or not recur at all. Recurrence is what turns a one-off course into an annual obligation without anybody remembering to re-run it.

Set it where the requirement genuinely repeats. A recurrence set on training that only needs doing once produces a compliance figure that falls every year for no reason.

Decision 6: what enforcement actually does

Enforcing evaluates all active rules and enrols matching employees who are not yet enrolled. The confirmation states the limits of it: people already enrolled or already completed are skipped.

Two consequences follow. Enforcement is safe to run repeatedly, because it does not duplicate or reset anybody. And a rule does nothing on its own — creating it defines the requirement, and enforcing it is what puts people on the course.

Decide who runs enforcement and how often. A rule created in March and never enforced shows an audience count and no enrolments.

Decision 7: retiring a rule

Deleting a rule is refused while active enrolments still reference it, and the product tells you to deactivate it or reassign them first. Where a delete does go through, the confirmation warns that enrolments the rule created may need sorting out by hand.

Deactivating is the safer route. It stops the rule reaching anybody new while leaving the history of what it required intact.

What is expensive to change later

Decision	Cost of changing later
Scope on a live rule	High. People join or leave the audience at the next enforcement, and enrolments already created do not disappear.
Deleting a rule with active enrolments	High. It is blocked while they exist, and enrolments may need sorting out by hand afterwards.
Target course or path	High. What people were enrolled on does not change retrospectively.
Recurrence	Medium. It changes when the requirement comes round again.
Deadline days	Medium. It applies from the next enrolment.
Rule name	Low.

What happens next

Create your rules, enforce them, then watch the compliance figure and the overdue list. The compliance percentage reported against mandatory training is produced by these rules, so a figure that looks wrong is almost always a scope that is wrong.