This article discusses training plans in QA. In enterprise accounts, administrators and team managers can assign training plans to teams and individual members. In both enterprise and personal accounts, members can assign themselves training plans.

This document contains the following sections:

• What Are Training Plans
• What Is in a Training Plan
• How to Navigate to Training Plans for Members
• How to Navigate Training Plans for Administrators

What Are Training Plans

A training plan is a tool to schedule and manage completing one or more courses and exams. Training plans give you centralized control of the training experience for teams or members on the QA platform.

Training plans offer a lot of power and flexibility with their content:

• You can assign an existing training plan template or create your own template.
• When you create your own, you can choose to start a new template from scratch or clone an existing training plan template to get started.
• When you create a template from scratch, you can include courses delivered by QA, or create custom content using Content Engine.

If you assign a training plan to a team that has subteams, the system shows you a list of all the subteams so you can choose the ones to which to assign the training plan.  

What Is in a Training Plan

The content of a training plan is called a training plan template. A training plan template contains one or more courses. courses are for bringing together courses, hands-on labs, lab challenges, playground labs, quizzes, practice certification exams, and exams on a related topic. For example, the following course includes two courses and an exam to get a learner started on Microsoft Azure.

Whereas a course brings together content related to a topic, a training plan lets you assign and schedule those courses. The training plan adds a layer where you can:

• Create a training plan where you pull together multiple courses to complete into a single template
• Assign the training plan to a team, an individual member, or yourself
• Schedule when the training plan should be complete and how much time to commit each week to completing it
• Send reminders to keep on schedule

While a course contains four hours to four weeks of training material, training plans typically range in duration from 3 to 12 months.

QA has built and maintains a broad and deep library of courses that are available when designing your training plans. You can also create your own training plan templates.

How to Navigate to Training Plans for Members

Members in personal accounts or enterprise accounts can use the Assigning Yourself a Training Plan article for more information about using training plans.

How to Navigate Training Plans for Team Managers

Administrators and team managers who want to assign a training plan to a team or individual member navigate to the Training Plans screen from the product dashboard. Hover your mouse over your company name in the upper-right corner and choose Training Plans from the menu that appears. The Training Plans screen appears with a list of the training plans that are already assigned in your account.

Tip: Rows showing completed training plans appear with a green background. Rows with training plans that are past their due date but not completed appear with a yellow background and a status of Ended.

From this screen, you can click a training plan from the list to open its Details screen. The training plan Details screen is where you can watch the progress through the content, make changes to the settings of your training plan, and send reminders to learners. See Managing Training Plans.

Tip: You can see what time the training plan is due by hovering over the Due Date on this screen and any screen where the due date appears.

You can create whatever training plan template you need for your onboarding, certification programs, or change management initiatives. The Content tab on the training plan (pictured below) shows the courses that learners finish to complete this training plan. See Creating a Training Plan for step-by-step instructions.

The content of training plans affects teams Skill Profile. You can monitor how the team members' skills improve as they complete training plans with the Skills tab.

In addition to flexible content, training plans also offer a lot of power in scheduling. You can choose how much time you want the team to commit each week when you create the training plan, and the training plan tells you when the content should be complete. Alternately, you can choose a deadline and the training plan tells you how much time the team must commit to meet it.

The training plan tool helps you manage your team as well. You can set the tool to remind team members automatically if they fall behind on their training time. You can also remind individual team members manually. See Training Plan Reminders and Nudges for more details.