Calling Training Names

Here’s the better part of an article that I wrote for the training department website for my employer. I hope it is useful to you.

When creating a new training, one of the things that people tend to want to skip past quickly is what it is called. After all, there’s a project name already, why not just call it that?

Well, the reason is that you want your training to be found! And you want people who you made it for to quickly understand that it is indeed relevant to them. But those people weren’t the ones involved in the project, and thus they usually won’t think to look for training under that name.

We try not to go crazy with rules for training titles (aka course names). So though we have guidelines as listed below, these are not strict, and you can likely find many examples that are live in our training catalog today that do not follow these guidelines yet. Many never will, as they are dynamically ported over from another system, or they were purchased from outside vendors and must retain their purchased name.

Please don’t let such things distract you from creating the best name for your training as you possibly can! Because this is what will help your competion numbers more than any other factor.

Training Title Naming Conventions

Training titles exist to provide unique and descriptive names for the training need, not the training content. When creating a title, don’t think about what it is but rather how the person it was created for would think to look for it. Remember, the training title should be discoverable in a user search and recognizable in an administrator assignment.

Search First

Before creating a new training course, do a search for it. This may sound counter-intuitive, but you’d be surprised just how often projects come our way that are duplicating existing training when they should be replacing it instead. If you have a name in mind, please run your own search to ensure that there are no other courses already using this name, or that if there are you are aware of them and can reconcile your approach with that existing content.

Uniqueness

There is no technical constraint that enforces unique training titles, you can have duplicate names. However, this will severely confuse not only your intended audience, but also our admins and especially any reporting you’ll want to do later. Please lead with a name that is clearly different from every other active training name.

Consistency

Your training does not have to be consistent with all other trainings in Cornerstone, but it should at least be consistent with all other trainings on the same topic. Whatever name & formatting you use, please stick with it. Even changing from “and” to “&” to “+” will introduce instability and questions where there don’t need to be any.

Words to Avoid

We strongly recommend that you omit these and other redundant and potenially conflicting words:

• training
• class
• classroom
• curriculum
• course
• module
• material
• link
• video
• ILT
• version

No version-based or date-based titles

While it is technically possible in Cornerstone change the title of training between incremental versions, we strive to describe content consistently and irrespective of versions. This starts with not putting a version number or date in the title of the training itself. If a training is on a policy from 2020, remember that it will still be the same policy when it gets updated in 2022. We do not need to create a new learning object when this happens, we need to version it and update the content. In the meantime, it just looks outdated for all of 2021, even though it isn’t. Focus on the training need, not the update name, the training need usually remains the same.

No numbered titles

Please resist the urge to call anything “101” or “module 1” or “chapter 3”. When we use such titles, we are limiting the places this training can go for no reason. If you want to enforce a sequence, we can use a pre-requisite or curriculum ordering. The title is not where this information belongs, as it introduces unneeded dependencies that tend to cause more confusion than clarity over time. Focus on what this standalone piece of content does, not where it is.

No language-based titles

In the past, titles like “Global Social Media Policy – China” were common. But to someone from China, seeing the name in English is not very useful. The title of every training should always be written in the language that the training itself is in. And we can often have a single training that is in multiple languages, which simplifies everything from assignment to reporting. If you’re tempted to put language in the title of a training, chances are there’s a better way to put this training on Cornerstone anyhow. Language is a property of the training, not a name for it.

Avoid the abbreviations & acronyms

Abbreviations and acronyms are perfectly appropriate for Training Descriptions, and make fantastic keywords! Titles are not the place to put them. Please avoid the use of any acronyms and/or abbreviations in training titles, as they typically don’t help the people the training was created for. Remember, don’t call it what you would call it, whenever possible call it what the people who need to learn what it even is would call it.

Role-based titles for Curricula

Curricula are often named after a job title or role, which is fine as long as it is complete and all-inclusive for the topic.

Function-based titles for content inside Curricula

All learning object types that are or may be contained within curricula should be named after a job function but not job title or job role. The reason for this is that the original audience a specific asset was developed for may not be the only audience it is made available or assigned to. For example, everyone with a view-only function can benefit from a given resource, regardless of their specific job. Thus we can have several different curricula with the same shared resource, providing a more efficient reuse of existing training.

What do you think? Any suggestions or arguments with what I’ve stated here? Let me know!