If you think your system could work better, read on. I receive many requests from users who want to know how to create efficient Chris21 skills processing. The good news is that you can configure Chris21 to create skills records automatically and generate reminders so that important refresher training is not overlooked. When you have your configuration right, the system will;

• automatically create skills records when employees complete training courses. This is the Skills – SKL form in Chris21;
• specify when each skill is due for refresh. This is a recent feature where the system will automatically populate the Next Refresh Date on SKL;
• create history records when training has been undertaken to refresh skills. This is the Skill History – SKH form in Chris21;
• send out reminders prior to the next refresh date. You set this up on Automatic Entries – ADE, based on the Next Refresh Date on SKL;
• provide skill gap reports that will identify additional skills training required by a position incumbent. This can be achieved with the system report, Skill Comparison – SKR;
• display training courses that deliver the training in the skills in which the incumbent is deficient.

Furthermore, with the correct setup, all the above-mentioned processes will happen automatically. Hence, there is less manual intervention needed by your training administrator and less chance that processes will be overlooked.

The configuration steps for automated Chris21 skills processing

I will assume that you currently do not record skills in Chris21 at this stage. But if you do have some minimal setup, then you may already have some skill codes in the system. In this case, you can ignore the first step in the list below. I will also assume that you already have Courses – CSD records and History – TRH records in your system.

The following Chris21 forms are used when setting up Chris21 skills processing:

• SKI – Skill Code. Create all of your skill codes. These codes are then used by many other processes. This form is also used to set the expiry period for a skill. Consequently, populating this form is your first step;
• CSK – Course Skills. Define all the skills that an employee will gain by completing a course;
• CSS – Session Skills. Define all the skills that an employee will gain by completing an individual course session;
• ADE – Automatic Entries. Create email reminders based on the Next Refresh Date on the Skills – SKL form;
• USR – User Access. Assign Workgroups to users;
• PSK – Position Skills. Add all the skills that position incumbents should possess.

Now that you are familiar with the configuration forms and what they are used for, the next step is to update these forms according to your requirements. There are a few things you will want to think about before you start, to ensure that you set the system up just how you need it.

For instance, do you want multiple skills to be associated with training courses, or will you just need a one to one mapping of course codes to skill codes? (I will go into detail about this in the next section). Another question might be, do all courses need refresh training or is it just some courses? And if they do, what is the refresh period?

While these questions are important, it is not vital that you are aware of all the requirements before you start. You can always revisit forms to update your configuration at a later stage.

Creating Skill Code – SKI records

As mentioned earlier, the very first step when configuring Chris21 skills processing is to create the skill codes. You create skill codes using the Skill Code – SKI form.

As previously mentioned, you can create a single skill code to match the course code. This is what we refer to as the one to one mapping and is the most basic configuration setup. In this case, you would create the skill code as an exact replica of the course code. If the course code is ABC123, then you would create the skill code as ABC123.

One small difficulty that you will probably face is with the number of characters available to you. The Course Code can be a maximum of 20 characters and the Description 174 characters, whereas the Skill Code can be a maximum of 16 characters and the Description 24 characters. This just means that in some cases the Skill Code descriptions will need to be abbreviated.

When you use a one to one mapping, it simply means that the employee will be assigned the same Skill Code in their Skills – SKL record as the course code of the course they completed.

For this scenario, you only need to create the ABC123 code in Skill Code – SKI. You will need to do this for all your current courses. In other words, for each current Courses – CSD record you will need to create the corresponding Skill Code – SKI record.

With this setup, whenever an employee completes a course they will be attributed with the corresponding single skill. If you want to make your configuration more sophisticated, you can set up for multiple skills per course.

In this scenario, the employee successfully completing a course will gain multiple skills. For example:

Once you have fully configured the system, any employee who successfully completes course ABC123 will gain four skills. In this example, four Skills – SKL records will be automatically created for each employee completing the course.

I will explain how to associate skills with courses in the next section. But there is one more very important configuration step when creating Skill Code – SKI records. For skill refresh dates to be updated, the system needs to know what the expiry period is for each skill code. You do this by entering a value in the Skill Expires After field.

This value is in months. Therefore, if a skill expires after two years, you would enter 24. With this detail entered, the system can now determine the Next Refresh Date when creating the Skills – SKL record. This date is important because it is used to trigger reminder emails when a skill refresh is becoming due. I will talk more about this later in this post.

Associating Skills with Courses

In the previous section I talked about assigning skills to employees when they successfully complete courses. I said you can setup your system to associate one skill with a course (in this case, the skill code is the same as the course code) or you can associate any number of skills with a single course.

To associate one or more skills to a course, you must firstly configure the Course Skills – CSK form.

If you want to have a one to one mapping with the Courses – CSD record, then this is the only Course Skills – CSK record that you need to create. As you can see from the screenshot above, the Associated Skill is the same as the Course Code. Note that the Associated Skill comes from the Skill Code – SKI record from the previous section.

If, however, you want to configure multiple skills for a course, you need to create multiple records on the Course Skills – CSK form. When you have done this, your CSK list will look something like this:

Now, when employees successfully complete course ABC123 they each attain four new skills. This will be four new Skills – SKL records in Chris21.

It’s very important to create Course Skills – CSK records when you create a new Courses – CSD record. If you don’t do this, then the process to automatically create Skills – SKL records will not be completed. This means that employees successfully completing training courses will not attain the appropriate skills. To reiterate, the CSK records must be in place prior to running the Update Skills process (I will discuss this process later in this post). It will not suffice to simply re-run the Update Skills process again if CSK records are added later.

Associating different skills with an individual course session

You can also create Session Skills – CSS records. This can be useful if a particular course session differs from the standard session for that Course. Course Skills – CSK records that have been created for a Course will automatically default to the Session Skills – CSS form. You can modify the Skills on CSS if required. Ultimately, it is the skills listed on CSS that the system will transfer to employees who successfully complete a session.

For example, for this session of ABC123 you could add the skill ABC127:

This means that for just this single session, all employees who successfully complete the Course ABC123 will be attributed with five skills, the additional skill being ABC127.

Setting up Chris21 to send reminder emails when skill refresher dates are due

Earlier in this post I described the Skill Expires After field on the Skill Code – SKI form. This is the field that tells the system the length in months until the skill is due for refresh. When the SKL record is created, the Next Refresh Date will be calculated and populated based on the value in the Skill Expires After field. Provided that the Next Refresh Date is populated, we can set the system up to send a reminder email to the employee and/or manager when refresh training is due.

To do this, you must create an Automatic Entries – ADE record. You use the ADE record to tell the system who to send a reminder email to, and when. Usually you will want to send the email at a predetermined time before the actual due date. Automatic Entries records can only be created using a date field on an employee based form. Look at the example below to see how to set up an ADE record:

The first field you enter is the Field Code. This must always be a date field. It is the date that will be used to trigger the reminder email. The other stipulation is that it must be the data dictionary Field Code. In this case SKL NXT REFR is the Chris21 Field Code for the Next Refresh Date on the Skills – SKL form. You will find the full list of Field Codes on the Data Dictionary – DMA form.

The Offset Period is used to determine when the reminder email will be sent. Usually, you will want this to be before the date in question. In the example above, I have set the Offset Period to be one month before the Next Refresh Date. The correct syntax must be used. If you want to set the reminder to be three months before the date, then you would enter -3M. You can also use W for Weeks, D for Days and Y for Years.

The Workgroup field is used if you want a specific group of Chris21 users to view the list of upcoming reminders. In our example, I have created a Workgroup called PAYROLL. Anyone who is assigned the PAYROLL Workgroup will be able to see a list of all the Next Refresh Date reminders. You will need to configure the following to create and assign users to Workgroups:

• Create the Workgroup. You must create a Table – TAB entry on the WORKG table. You can have multiple workgroups. For example, you might want one for HR, Training, Administration, etc.
• Assign the Workgroup to the user. You do this using the User Access – USR form, as shown below:

Notice above that the Reminder Workgroup field has the PAYROLL Workgroup selected. Also note that you must check the Show Reminders checkbox.

It’s important to remember that the Automatic Entries – ADE record must be created before Skills – SKL records are created. This is because when the Next Refresh Date is entered and the record saved, then the email trigger is ‘set’. This means that any Skills – SKL records created prior to the creation of the ADE record won’t trigger any reminders. You can, however, reset the triggers by removing the Next Refresh Dates and then re-entering and re-saving the records.

Defining position skills

You use the Position Skills – PSK form to record all the skills that incumbents should possess in their position. This is essential if you want to produce skills gap analysis reports. To complete this part of the configuration you will have to determine what skills should be attached to each position in your organisation. Once you have this information at hand you can create the individual PSK records. As this can be a labour-intensive task, you can use the GTR process to electronically load the PSK records. This is not only a very efficient process, but it also validates each record as it is loaded to ensure only valid records enter the system.

If you need more information about the GTR process, see my blog Increase Your Productivity Using GTR Processing.

Once you have created a list of required skills for a position, you can look at the incumbents Skills – SKL records to determine where gaps in learning and skills exist.

From our previous example we can see that the Skills – SKL records for this employee is as follows: 

A quick glance shows that the employee is still missing three skills; ABC456, ABC457 and ABC458. Of course, in a real-life situation an employee could have a very large list of skills on both PSK and SKL. Standard Chris21 reports such as Skill Comparison – SKR can be run over multiple employees to provide detailed information about skill gaps.

Automating Chris21 skills processing

Now that you have completed the configuration, you can set the system up to automatically take care of the creation of Skills – SKL records and send reminders when skill refresher dates become due. I will describe the process once Training History – TRH records have been created in your system. There are a few different ways to produce the TRH records, therefore I won’t go into these in this post. Instead, I will assume that you are at the stage where you are regularly creating TRH records.

The automated process will do the following:

• Create Skills – SKL records. Multiple records may be created depending on how many skill you have associated with a Course on the Course Skills – CSK form;
• Update the Skills Updated? field on training History – TRH records;
• Update the Next Refresh Date on the Skills – SKL form;
• Create Skill History – SKH records when a skill has been refreshed.

Once your training History – TRH records have been created you will notice that the Skills Updated? field is unchecked:

This indicates that the course has been completed by the employee but that the Skills – SKL record has not been created. In other words, the employee has not been assigned the skill (or skills) associated with the Course.

To ensure that Skills are assigned to employees you must run the Update Skills – SKU process. This process will look at the Course Skills – CSK records to determine the skills associated with the course. It will then automatically create all the relevant Skills records.

The SKU record above will process all ABC123 training History – TRH records where the Skills Updated? field is unchecked. You enter an asterisk * in the Course Date field to ensure the process looks at all dates. SKU will automatically set the Skills Updated? checkbox to checked. This will ensure that subsequent process don’t recreate duplicate Skills records. If you want to run SKU over all courses, simply place an asterisk * in the Course Code field.

After running SKU you can see that the Skills Updated? field is now checked:

The process is now complete. In our example, when employees successfully complete the ABC1213 Course, they will attain four skills. We know this because we created four records on Course Skills – CSK. The Update Skills – SKU process will create four Skills – SKL records for each Course attendee. You can see this in the Skills record for the employee:

Furthermore, you will notice that the Next Refresh Date has been populated. As described earlier, this date is calculated using the value entered in the Skill Expires After field on the Skill Code – SKI form. This has been set to 24 months for each of the entries on CSK and you can see this reflected above as 1/05/2019 – two years after the Last Refresh Date. If you have your Automatic Entries – ADE record setup, email reminder triggers have now been set for the Next Refresh Date on the Skills records created. In this example, the reminders will be sent one month prior to the Next Refresh Date and will be sent to the Employee and the Manager.

The Update Skills process will also create Skill History – SKH records. A Skill History record will be created when an existing Skills – SKL record is updated after refresher training. Effectively, the existing record is moved to SKH and the most recent record appears on SKL.

One last step to fully automate the process, is to schedule the Update Skills process to run automatically on a regular basis. It’s a good idea to schedule this process to run daily to ensure the system is always up to date. Remember that SKU will only process records where the Skills Updated? field on the training History – TRH form is unchecked. For help scheduling reports refer to my post Chris21 Quick Tip – How to Schedule Reports in Chris21.

If you follow these configuration instructions, you will find that you will have an automated system that takes care of your Chris21 skills processing and generates timely reminders to employees to help ensure skills are always refreshed on time. You only need to update your configuration when new Course – CSD records are added to your system. If you have any questions or problems, or indeed if you have successfully implemented this process I would be interested to hear about it.

The post How to – Chris21 Skills Processing and Refresher Training Reminders appeared first on System Logic.

Chris21 already includes a quite extensive training module which will allow you to enter training data and produce gap analysis reports. In Chris21 this report is called the Skills Comparison (SKR) report. Some example output from this report is shown below:

As you can see, the employee shown above has attained some of the skills that are required for this position but there are still many skills yet to be attained. With this information at hand, training can be targeted so that this employee can work towards attaining the remaining skills.

A further benefit of configuring your system this way is improved HR21 functionality. In HR21, gap analysis information is displayed so that employees can view their own gap analysis information. They can then apply to attend relevant training courses. On the other hand, employees can view other positions. For instance, an employee may be considering applying for a vacancy within the organisation. In HR21 employees can get the information about how their own skill set is matched to vacancies before applying.

Of course, the downside is that your Chris21 database needs to be correctly configured to be able to display this information. I say downside because it will take a significant amount of effort to configure this properly.

Steps to Configuring your Database for Chris21 Gap Analysis Reports

1. Populate the Position Skills (PSK) form to include all of the skills required for each position in your organisation.
2. Create either Course Skills (CSK) or Session Skills (CSS) records. These define all of the skills that will be attained when a course is successfully completed.
3. Create Training History (TRH) records when employees have completed courses.
4. Run the Update Skills (SKU) process to assign skills to employees.

You can read my blog Updating Skills in Chris21 Learning and Development for more information and help with the above steps.

While it will take some significant resources to ensure your database is correctly configured, you will reap the benefits when you run your Skills Comparison reports. Once you have this setup it is a straightforward process to update employee skill records. In fact this can be automated further by scheduling the Update Skills process to run automatically on a regular basis. For more information about scheduling reports see How to Schedule Reports in Chris21.

The good news is that ongoing maintenance will be minimal. Maintenance will only be required when you add new positions and new courses in Chris21. New positions will mean creating the associated Position Skills records, while for new courses you will have to enter new Course Skills of Session Skills records.

If you can find the time and resources to set your Chris21 database up this way you will find that you will be able to run very valuable and informative reports. Being in a position to run Chris21 gap analysis reports will give you an overall picture of how well your training delivery is meeting organisational needs.

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The correct configuration of Chris21 is very important to ensure the Update Skills process works as expected. When you set up a Course (CSD) record in Chris21 you must then create the associated skills on Course Skills (CSK). When I say associated skills I mean any skills that will be attained by completing the course. This could be a single skill or multiple skills depending on the course.

When you subsequently create a Course Session (CSE) record, the Course Skills will automatically be transferred to Session Skills. The Update Skills process then transfers any skills it finds on Session Skills to the course attendee’s Skills (SKL).

It’s also useful to know that you can manually update Session Skills records. This is helpful if a particular session has changed slightly from the norm and perhaps one or more of the skills aren’t covered.

You can find more information about the Update Skills process in my article Updating Skills in Chris21 Learning and Development.

The important thing to keep in mind when running the Update Skills process is to ensure that your system is correctly configured as outlined above. Without this you will find that not all skills will be attributed to course attendees.

The post Troubleshooting the Update Skills Process in Chris21 appeared first on System Logic.

If you use the Chris21 Learning and Development (or training) module and you maintain Skills (SKL) records then this article might be of interest to you.

I have helped many clients to configure learning and development in Chris21 and one of the biggest complaints is that the Next Refresh Date isn’t automatically updated. So even after using the Skills Update (SKU) process to automatically create Skills records, you still have to go back to each record to update the Next Refresh Date.

You can automate this process so that Next Refresh Dates are updated much more efficiently and with minimal manual input required by the Chris21 user.

You can take this approach by making use of the available tools in Chris21 and then use a simple Excel macro to automate the update process. I have provided an insight into the power of macros in my blog Chris21 Reporting – a Client Success Story.

I have implemented this for clients in four steps. This is what I did:

1. Record the skill expiry term for each skill you have recorded in Chris21. This is necessary because the macro needs to know what date to assign to the Next Refresh Date. To be able to do this requires a straightforward customisation to add the Skill Expiry Term field to the Skill Code (SKI) form in Chris21. I explain how to add a field in my blogs Customising Chris21 The Right Way and Customising Chris21 Forms – How to Place a Field onto a Form.
2. Add the Skill Expiry Term to each skill on the Skill Code form.
3. Create a report designer report that displays all Skills records that don’t have a Next Refresh Date along with the Skill Expiry Term.
4. Create the macro to add the Skill Expiry Term to the Last Refresh Date field and insert the new date into the Next Refresh Date column in your report output. The macro that I have developed also generates a text file in the required format so that you can process it via the GTR form in Chris21.

Once you have set your system up this way, you will have a method for updating the Next Refresh Date on the Skills form. The process will be:

1. Run the Skills Update process to assign skills attained in training courses to attendees.
2. Run the report to identify Skills records that do not have a Next Refresh Date.
3. Run the macro to create the GTR text file.
4. Run the GTR process in Chris21 to update Skills records.

The macro can be run anytime, it doesn’t necessarily have to be each time the Skills Update process is run. You could, for instance, run the macro at the end of each fortnight to ensure your learning and development data is kept up to date.

To complete the process, you might want to consider setting up reminders to alert employees and managers when skill refreshers are becoming due. You could set this up so that a reminder is sent three months (this is arbitrary and can be whatever timeframe you choose) before the skill expires.

This article provides an example of how solutions can be found when the system won’t do what you need it to do. Follow these steps and you will have a much more efficient way of managing your Chris21 learning and development process.

Please contact me if you would like more information about how to do this or if you need some help implementing this solution.

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Updating Skills in Chris21 should be included in your learning and development procedures. Whether you are using the standard Training module or the enhanced Learning and Development module, you should be transferring the skills learned in courses to the attendee’s personal skills records.

How do you assign skills to courses?

The system needs to know what skills an employee has achieved when a course has been successfully completed. You tell the system what skills to assign by creating either Course Skills (CSK) entries or Session Skills (CSS) entries.

If you choose to use Course Skills to record the skills associated with a course, then when you create the course session those skills will default to the Session Skills form. You can however, decide not to use Course Skills. In this case you will need to enter Session Skills whenever a session is created. This is a more onerous task but may be required if there are some differences in the way a course is presented from session to session.

Note that you first must ensure you have entered skills on the Skill Code (SKI) form. This is where you record all of the skills that can be associated with all of your courses. You may also need to create additional skills on Skill Code as new courses are created.

Once your skills are set up and your course has been created, you can then create your course skills entries. There may be multiple skills associated with a single course.

Updating skills in Chris21 when a course has been completed.

When an employee is booked on a training course, a training History (TRH) record is created. Depending on how you use the system, this record can be created automatically or you will manually create it. On this form there is a field called Skills Updated? This field should remain unchecked. It will be automatically checked when the skills are updated by the Update Skills process.

When a course has been completed and you want to transfer the skills learned to each attendee, you use the Update Skills (SKU) process:

Course Code. You can enter a course code if you want to update skills just from that course. Usually you will want to enter an * here so that the process will pick up all courses.

Course Date. Enter the date if you want to update skills from courses that ran on that date. Enter an * here so the process will pick up all session dates.

Group/Session. A session could be run more than once on a given date. In this case, the sessions will be identified by the Group or Session number. Enter an * so the process will pick up all Group/Session numbers.

Update Recommendation Date. This is used if you are using Skills Recommendations (TRR) to recommend employees onto courses. Select the checkbox to use the date that has been entered in the Completed field on the Sessions (CSE) form into the Action Completed field on the Skills Recommendations form. If the checkbox is not selected, then today’s date is entered.

Update Session Date. The Skills Update process will do the following depending on whether this checkbox is cleared or checked:

• If checked it will set the date in the Last Refresh Date field on the Staff Skills (SKL) and Skill History (SKH) forms to the date in the Date Commenced field that has been specified on the Sessions (CSE) form.
• If left clear it will set the Last Refresh Date field on Staff Skills (SKL) and Skill History (SKH) forms to the date entered in the Date Completed field on the Sessions (CSE) form.
• Clears the date in the Next Refresh Date field on the Staff Skills (SKL) entry.

Manager’s Rating. If you use the Manager’s Rating field on the training History form, you can select a common manager’s rating to be applied to all history records affected by the skills update process.

Staff Rating. If you use the Staff Rating field on the training History form, you can select a common staff rating to be applied to all history records affected by the skills update process.

Result for History. You can select a common result to be applied to all history records affected by the skills update process.

After entering the required fields, Save the Skills Update record. Go to the report output window to view the results of the process. The output file will show a list of all the skills and the employees whose Skill (SKL) records were updated. Then go to the Skill record for one of the employees in the list to see that the record has been updated.

To complete the process it is recommended that you set up a schedule to run this process automatically and on a regular basis. Look out for my next blog when I explain how to schedule reports in Chris21.

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