Use of Naming Conventions

How to Get Started

Naming conventions assist with the management of your Alchemy system, provided you initiate and maintain systems that are communicated throughout your organization. Below are some tips to help get you started. 

• Abbreviations: Incorporate common abbreviations used in your organization. For example, abbreviate worksite and department names. 
• Categorize: Discuss if delivery methods and course types are important distinctions in your naming convention. For example, you may want to include OBS for company specific courses that are meant to be used for observations or EL for courses meant for eLearning. 
• Assessment: Establish a cadence for course review. Identify the stakeholders that will be involved in this process. Discuss if revision dates need to be included in naming conventions and how that will be reflected in the names. 
• Multilingual Courses: Choose a naming convention to clearly distinguish between courses in different languages. For example, ESP for activities in Spanish. 
• Indexing: When creating custom course categories, it is imperative to have a system that Alchemy users in your organization can understand. Course codes must be unique and for this purpose, creating an indexing system might be suitable to include in your naming convention. 
• Arrangement: Discuss how you want established elements ordered in your naming convention. For example, worksite and shifts may come first in the name, followed by the language, then topic. This helps arrange names and titles in Manager, allowing you to clearly discern Manager groups, learning plans and courses. 

Users: Groups

Groups are crucial for organizing users as well as learning plans and subsequent reports. Instead of selecting individual users, you can create and assign an entire group of users to a Learning Plan and generate reports on the group's training progress. Naming conventions keep your groups clean and organized and can be paired with learning plans to offer a streamlined training record process. Below are some examples of group names. 



 

Activities: Learning Plans

Learning Plans are a great way to accomplish training goals. With learning plans, you can program routine training activities with deadlines for reporting purposes. One way to build clear and uniform learning plans across your organization is to ensure learning plan names are descriptive of their content in Manager.  Using appropriate naming conventions is helpful to establish;

• Plans that are specific to a subject type, and/or group of users
• Plans used for internal training and development
• Plans that meet auditing standards and regulations
• Plans that are clear when used in kiosk mode

Below are some examples of naming conventions for learning plans.

Activities: Company Specific Courses

For courses, establish a naming system that addresses the fundamental training needs for your organization. Naming conventions can be used for your course names and course codes. Courses require codes that are unique and cannot be repeated, so creating an index system that coincides with your naming convention can help maintain courses organized. The following are two examples of effective methods for naming courses.

Example A:
This examples consists of a naming convention that includes worksite, department, delivery types and an organization-wide indexing number. 

Example B:
Below is an example that identifies worksite, department, course topic, the language, revision date/year. This is great option for custom courses that are being translated from a parent course. 

For more information on Custom Categories, refer to our Rules and Best Practices article.