Purpose: This article explains how Personnel Roles work in Administrate and how they are used to manage training delivery staff, scheduling, availability, communications, and reporting.
Personnel Roles define the different types of people involved in delivering training, such as Instructors, Facilitators, Assessors, Coaches, Subject Matter Experts, or Guest Trainers.
Table of contents
- Personnel Roles vs other roles
- System Roles vs Custom Personnel Roles
- Creating a Personnel Role
- Adding a Personnel Role to a Contact
- Assigning Personnel Roles to Events
- Personnel Exceptions
- Availability and Conflict Checking
- Communications by Personnel Role
Personnel Roles let you define, manage, and assign the different types of people involved in delivering your training. In addition to system roles like Administrators and Instructors, you can create custom roles such as Facilitators, Assessors, Coaches, or Guest Trainers, and manage how they are scheduled, communicated with, and reported on.
This gives you more flexibility for complex or high-value training operations while keeping availability, communications, and reporting consistent.
Personnel Roles vs other roles
Administrate uses the word role in several different contexts. These concepts are related, but they are not interchangeable.
| Concept | Purpose |
|---|---|
| User Roles and Permissions | Control what a User can access or do within Administrate. |
| Job Roles | Describe a Contact’s organizational or operational function for classification, reporting, and workflows such as Automatic Registration. |
| Personnel Roles | Define training delivery responsibilities used for Event staffing, availability, conflict checking, communications, and reporting. |
Use Personnel Roles when you need to manage who can support or deliver training in a specific delivery capacity.
System Roles vs Custom Personnel Roles
Administrate includes two system roles by default:
- Administrators: Used for platform access and management.
- Instructors: Used for delivering training and instructor-specific workflows.
These system roles cannot be edited or removed.
Custom Personnel Roles allow you to define additional roles specific to your organization, such as Facilitators, Assessors, Coaches, or Subject Matter Experts.
Custom roles can be configured for availability tracking, conflict checking, communications, and reporting.
Creating a Personnel Role
You can create and manage Personnel Roles from the Control Panel > Personnel Roles.
Once created, the role becomes available across Contacts, Events, Communications, and Reports.
Adding a Personnel Role to a Contact
Personnel Roles are assigned at the Contact level. This allows the same Contact to hold multiple roles if needed.
To assign a role to a Contact:
- Open a Contact record.
- Navigate to the Personnel Role section.
- Add one or more roles to the Contact.
- Save your changes.
The Contact can now be selected for Events, availability views, and role-based communications using those roles.
Assigning Personnel Roles to Events
You can assign Personnel with specific roles directly to Events.
The personnel table on the Event shows a list of qualified instructors based on your role and achievement requirements. If you want to see only your Personnel Exceptions, previously known as Approved Instructors, filter on the name column and select the Contacts you need.
To assign Personnel to an Event:
- From an Event, go to the Personnel section.
- Select the Role and find the Contact you want to assign to the Event.
If the role is configured for availability and conflict checking, Administrate will validate scheduling conflicts automatically.
Personnel Exceptions
Personnel Exceptions replace the previous Approved Instructors feature. Instead of maintaining a list of who can deliver a specific course, exceptions work the other way around. The system filters Contacts by role and achievement requirements automatically. Exceptions let you add specific people who should be eligible for booking even if they don't meet those requirements.
Your current setup is not affected. If you use Approved Instructors today, everything continues to work as it does now. The difference is you can start using achievement requirements to control who qualifies for any role, not just instructors.
The system does not block you. If you book someone who falls short of a requirement, it flags the gap on the Event and your dashboard so you always know where issues exist.
Availability and Conflict Checking
For roles configured to track availability:
- Assigned Personnel appear on the Availability Calendar.
- Conflicts are detected.
- You can filter availability views by Personnel Role.
This allows you to focus conflict checking only on the roles that matter for your delivery model.
Communications by Personnel Role
You can create Communications that target specific Personnel Roles. Role-based Communications ensure the right information reaches the right people without manual filtering.
To send Communications by Personnel Role, you must create a Communication Template with an audience of Contacts, and then use Triggers configured for specific Personnel Roles.