The Qualifications feature is used for storing and tracking training, qualifications or certificates.
What's covered in this guide?
How to create a qualification
To create a qualification, navigate to Workforce > Qualifications and click + New Qualification. You only need to give the qualification a name. All other fields are optional, such as:
Maximum hours per week: Used to warn managers on the schedule and during a shift. This is used mostly to monitor maximum visa working hours.
Customise expiry notification frequency: Allows managers to set multiple customised notification frequencies per Qualification to provide ample warning regarding the expiry.
Prohibit schedule/rota publishing: This will prevent a shift being published if an employee does not hold the relevant qualification.
Automatically add staff with this qualifications to Teams that require it: makes an employee holding this qualification a member of any team that has this qualification as required.
Request proof of qualifications during onboarding: This enables the qualification to be selected during the creation of an onboarding invitation. New staff will be able to upload files against the qualification within onboarding in the mobile app. Note: employees must have access to upload Qualifications. Learn how to enable here.
Important: If you don't see the Qualification option in your Workforce menu, ensure the qualifications feature is turned on. Admins can turn on the qualification feature by navigating to Settings > Feature Management > Qualifications.
Effective dates
When 'Prohibit rota publishing' is selected, an additional option of 'Should block publishing outside of effective dates ranges' appears. If checked, this option will block roster publishing, claiming of shifts, etc. when the shift is outside the qualification's effective dates:
See below an example of the effective dates on an employees qualification. If this employee was rostered to work hours after 1st August, and the Should block publishing outside of effective dates ranges is enabled, the roster will show an error and block the employees shift/s from being published:
Assign Qualifications to Staff
You can assign a qualification to an employee within their profile.
To assign a qualification to an employee:
Navigate to an employee profile through Workforce > Staff > Employee name > HR
Select Train & Qualify tab
Select + Add Qualification to add a new qualification, edit the qualification details, and then select Create User Qualification to finalize
Qualification expiry notifications
Employees are always notified of impending and expired qualifications, but you can select which management roles you wish to be notified.
To customize manager notifications, navigate to Settings > Permissions > Manager Permissions > Receive qualification expiry and update alerts
Expired qualifications will always flag to managers on the dashboard and on the staff list.
Dashboard:
Staff list:
Notifications by email are triggered by the below events:
1 month prior to a qualification expiring, a warning email is sent (default)
On the expiry date itself (default)
On the months/week as set when customizing notification frequency
Whenever an employee updates their own qualification details
Allow staff to update or add their own qualifications
To allow staff to edit or update their qualifications, navigate to Settings > All Settings > Permissions > Employee Permissions and tick the Allow staff to update qualifications option:
All updates made by an employee require manager approval before updating in their profile. Managers will be alerted via email when a qualification is pending approval.
Learn more about this Employee Self Service, including how to update or add a qualification through the app, in this help guide.
Set up maximum working hours alerts
An alert will be sent through your mobile app if staff are at risk of exceeding the maximum hours work. This will happen on each staff clock out, if their past clocked hours plus their future scheduled hours are more than the maximum hours you will receive an alert.
To enable this, go to Settings > Notifications and tasks > Key Alerts > Qualification maximum hours risk
How this feature works:
When an employee clocks out Workforce.com takes all timesheet hours in the past, then adds them to all scheduled hours in the future. If this adds up to more than the maximum hours for that qualification, the manager will receive a push notification.
You can also customize the receiver of the alerts. Receiving this notification will be through the mobile app so make sure you have our Workforce.com Mobile app installed.
Report on qualifications
To download a report of employee's current qualifications, navigate to Workforce > Staff > Tools > Export > Employee data (CSV)
The file will contain a list of all qualifications that are 'Current', along with their expiry dates and future Effective Dates. To make it easier to read, you can use Excel's 'Text to columns' functionality to split the data up. Select a comma as the first delimiter and semicolon as the second delimiter. Search 'How to split text to columns in Excel' to find a tutorial. Enter the details, and click Update Employee Details to save your changes:
Staff notifications
Employees will receive an email containing all qualifications that are expiring in exactly one month, and again if the qualification expired before it is updated. These emails are sent out at 8 am according to the organization’s Timezone:
Self-managed Student Visas
The combination of features and alerts work together to ensure that during term time visa worker hours get close to 20 hours per week, but not over:
Managers alerted if employee at risk of exceeding their maximum hours
Prevent schedule publishing if above maximum hours or visa expired
Set restrictions to apply only during term times
Allow employees to update their qualifications, with manager approval and audit trail
Set which permission levels receives notifications for qualification updates and upcoming expiry dates
Set which permission levels can edit and approve all qualifications
Report on student visas
Set up Student Visa Qualification
You can seamlessly manage student visas in Workforce through Qualifications. Setting this up is just the same as how you configure qualifications.
Use the above qualification guide to enable the qualifications feature. Then, create a new qualification called 'Student Visa' and set the maximum hours. Tick 'Prohibit rota publishing' (optional).
Lastly, apply the qualification to your student visa employees on their profiles by ticking 'Current':
Key Alert for maximum hours
If you want to be notified if your staff is at overtime risk, you can enable the Key Alerts through your settings. Click the cog wheel icon at the top right corner > Notifications and tasks > Qualification maximum hours risk > select the people who should receive the alerts:
Make sure you have downloaded our mobile app so you will receive the alerts.
Prevent publishing schedule if hours exceeded
To do this, go to Workforce > Qualifications > click the ‘pencil icon’ to edit the qualification > tick the box that says ‘Prohibit rota publishing’. An additional option will appear if you want to block publishing outside of effective date ranges.
You will always see a schedule warning if you’ve scheduled them for more than 20 hours or if the qualification is expired, but enabling this options means you won't be able to publish the schedule if this warning is showing:
If you are using Employee Self Service, unapproved changes to the qualification will also prohibit schedule publishing.