We have been hard at work creating “Career Frameworks” for our team members which will help guide their progress in their current roles and ensure they are prepared for the next upcoming role if one exists on a linear path.  Now that we have defined the actions that are essential for team members in the role, we are now working on the daunting task of assigning recommended content.  The key word here is recommended.  Even with the updates to the Learning Plans area which now allows for marking some courses as “optional,” Learning Plans simply don’t ideally fit our use case in this instance.  We used learning plans in the past and users assumed they had to complete absolutely everything in the path even if it was 30+ courses.  We have users coming in at a variety of different skill levels, and while one team member may need all the basics, another team member in the same role may only need the more intermediate or advanced topics for their role, and we don’t want them to be enrolled in all of those things at once, but rather have the ability to pick and choose what they want to enroll in based on the suggested courses.

Furthermore, my higher ups would like these courses to be able to be broken down visually into different topics - safety and quality, technical skills, leadership, etc.  From everything I’ve been able to brainstorm, this may force me to create 3-5 Catalogs or Channels for every single role within our Framework in addition to our normal Catalogs so that I could put all of those Catalogs on a singular page. This would result in the potential creation of hundreds of Catalogs or Channels to satisfy this ability to visually separate the courses on pages.

The only thing I’ve been able to brainstorm so far that may work as a potential work-around to only creating one Catalog per role, if management would accept it, would be potentially creating searchable/filterable Course Additional Fields to apply as the “topic” sorting option for individual courses. (I know these are only filters in Catalogs, not Channels.)  It would be relatively unlikely that a course would appear under multiple topic headings even if it were cross-suggested to another role.

I know that I could turn on categories as a filter if I wanted to re-do this structure, but this is very unlikely.  We use categories for different things right now, and it’s also possible that some courses would fall under multiple umbrellas, so this form of filtering is not ultimately useful to us.

I still wanted to post and see if anyone else had any additional insights or suggestions on how something like this may be accomplished without going through the lengths of creating hundreds of Catalogs. Has anyone gotten creative with something like this?  It feels like going down the path of these very niche catalogs could create a future administration nightmare well beyond the initial set-up.