Courses

A course is a unit of training — the material someone needs to learn and a record that they did. traceunified handles both training you deliver in-app and training completed elsewhere, so your competency records are complete in one place.

Internal courses

An internal course hosts its material in the platform. Learners work through content — documents to read and videos to watch — and their progress is tracked as they go. Because the material and the completion record live together, there’s no gap between “we have a procedure” and “people have actually been trained on it.”

External courses

Not all training happens in traceunified. An external course records training completed in another system — a learning management platform, an instructor-led session, an external certification. The learner uploads their certificate and a Quality Manager verifies it, and only that verification completes the course, so externally delivered competency still shows up in your records rather than sitting in a separate system the auditor can’t see.

Assigning courses

Training only matters if the right people take it. Courses are assigned to individuals, typically with a due date, so each person has a clear set of training they’re responsible for and a deadline to complete it. Assignment is per person, not by role, so when someone joins or changes responsibilities their assignments are made for them directly. Whether a course is mandatory is a property of the course and the project it applies to (see Training configuration), not a flag on an individual assignment.

Prerequisites and paths

Courses can depend on one another, so a learner completes foundational training before advancing, and related courses can be grouped into a path. This structures a training program rather than leaving it as a flat list — someone is guided through the right sequence for their role.

From course to competency record

Completing a course — and, where required, passing its assessment or signing an acknowledgment — produces the competency record your quality system depends on. The next articles cover those two ways of confirming that training actually took hold.