I use them essentially for finding courses since we have many different groups using the LMS, as a super admin you can see them all so some kind of identifying code helps to find like courses easily.

I didn’t get a chance to read through - but here is my shorthand….

“Company abbreviation” - “BusinessUnit/Catalog abbreviation” - number - year 20xx*

*. year applies only for learning republished on an annual cadence.
 

if you work with a triplet of information? Like adding location????You will probably be golden…as you mine your code you will get a lot of it.

One of the special cases we do is set our course codes to drive display order. We have a few special catalogs (like all our information on Benefits) where the catalog displays as the full page, and we set the catalog to display in course code order. Then we set the codes to display exactly the order we want on the page (most to least important).

You can find more info on this best practice in the following post: 

@dklinger “as you mine your code you will get a lot of it.” this is what I am trying to get at. What can I get out of it? So far I see admin locating courses, sort order for admins and users, identifying retired courses. What else are course codes useful for? 

Like @spotratz we use the course codes to drive display order in catalogs. If you use sequential codes you can display the courses in chronological order. You can also use a common identifier in the code to group related courses together rather than distributing them randomly throughout the catalog. The advantage of this approach is that you can control the display order without modifying the names of the courses.

Our schema is as follows:

Audience (one letter)
Country (two letters)
“Generation” (one number) … a generation is a complete rework of a learning plan. If it is just a course, then the generation is always 1
_ (separator)
Course number (4 numbers)
_ (separator)
Language (1 or 2 letters)