Organization · 4 min read
As the number of courses grows, the catalog turns into a list nobody looks at. Organizing it by role and by level helps people understand what they must do, what they can do and why.
At first there are only a few courses and they are easy to find. Then come the mandatory ones, the ones on new tools, the ones a customer asked for, the ones a department prepared for its own colleagues. A couple of years later the catalog holds dozens of titles, some duplicated, others out of date, and people no longer know where to start.
The problem is not quantity but organization. A catalog sorted by topic reflects the point of view of whoever writes the courses. A catalog sorted by role reflects the point of view of whoever takes them, and it is almost always more useful.
One signal not to ignore is the questions that reach HR or managers: which course do I need to take, is this one mandatory, where can I find the safety one. If they keep coming up, the catalog is not doing its job.
For each role it helps to distinguish three levels. The first is mandatory: courses required by law, by a policy or by a contract, with a deadline and often a renewal. The second is recommended: courses the manager considers necessary to do the job well, even if no rule requires them. The third is optional: deeper dives that people choose to grow or to prepare for a change of role.
This distinction may seem obvious, but it changes how training is perceived. People see at a glance what is essential and what is an opportunity, and managers can focus their reminders on the first level without treating every course as an emergency.
A catalog stays readable if a few maintenance rules are in place. Every course has an owner, who keeps it up to date and decides when to retire it. Every course is based on a reference document, which avoids parallel versions of the same topic prepared by different departments. And every new course is compared with existing ones before it is published: often it is enough to add a lesson to a path that already exists.
Titles matter too. A title that says what you will learn, such as “Recording a non-conformity” rather than “Quality, module 3,” helps people choose and makes the catalog searchable with a simple query.
Once a year it is worth doing a cleanup: retiring courses nobody takes anymore, merging those that overlap, and checking that the source documents are still in force.
Maintenance rules
A role-based catalog only works if the roles are the real ones. If the org chart used for training differs from the one HR uses, assignments become manual work and sooner or later they slip. The link to employee records is therefore the starting condition, not a technical detail. Before building the catalog, it is worth checking that the roles and departments on record are genuinely up to date.
With that link in place, the catalog becomes dynamic. Someone who changes role sees the mandatory and recommended courses for the new position appear, a new hire finds their path ready and waiting, and the department manager knows at any moment who has completed what.
A role-based catalog speaks the language of the people taking the courses, not the people writing them.
In Learning, the catalog is organized by role and department, using the structure already set up in People. Each course has a level, an owner and a link to the document it was generated from, so it is always clear where it comes from and who needs to update it.
People see first what their role requires, with deadlines highlighted, and can browse the rest of the catalog to choose further courses. New courses generated by the AI from procedures and manuals only enter the catalog once the owner has approved them.
The result is a catalog that stays tidy as it grows: fewer duplicates, clear titles and, for each person, a short, understandable list of what concerns them.
Keep reading
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Innovaq is a company in its launch phase.