Hi Dan,

Unfortunately I can't move the discussion - but here are the salient points:

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Support secondary/aspirational positions (including multiple managers) You will be aware that user profiles have Secondary (and Aspirational) positions. These do not trigger any kind of learning, and are more for information purposes at present.

It is a much featured request in the forums (such as this post today).

We hear from you regularly that it is common for job sharing to occur, for people to have more than one position and for people to have more than one manager. We would like to ask for partners to share what that means for learning management requirements  that they are hearing from clients around use cases for supporting:

• secondary positions
• aspirational positions and
• multiple managers

so that we can start to build some common requirements."

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We've found that this kind of functionality is mostly requested by healthcare organisations here in the Netherlands. Nurses quite often have two contracts that really function as two seperate positions. Learning requests need to be approved by one of the two managers, as he/she is responsible for his/her own budget.

The scenario usually requires support for departmental training budgets as well. To be quite frank these two things seem really intertwined. Accommodating multiple positions/managers is helpful but it probably wouldn't be enough for these type of prospects. They need multiple positions/managers to facilitate proper accounts management."

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What we really need is the ability to:

• add multiple positions to a user (not limited to just two + aspirational) - it's frequent for users to hold many simultaneous positions, particularly in an organisation that has job shares or uses bank/contract staff;
• assign multiple managers to each position. 

An aspirational position would be useful if it supported gap analysis against goals/competencies."

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With multiple managers assigned to each position, how do you imagine notifications and approvals would work?

If a user needs approval for something, should a notification go to one specific manager or all managers? If its the former how would the system know which user to send it to?

For approval, can any manager approve things or just one? For reporting, would the user show up under "My team" for each manager?

Finally, if one manager approves something, would you expect the other managers to be notified?"

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We have implemented a form of multi-stage approval:

1. Primary manager receives message for approval
2. If he denies, it is game over
3. If he accepts, he can decide whether a 2nd approval is needed and picks another user, e.g. from the Finance dept.
4. and so on

This is very bespoke to a particular customer. I am wondering whether there is room to have one or many "approvers" sitting alongside managers. A user has a line manager (primary) plus a deputy manager (secondary). The line manager also acts as the approver (1st approver) and somebody from Finance has to sign it off (second approver)."

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One question I have is, how do people feel about the current approach of using position types (primary, secondary, aspirational) as a container for several other pieces of data (title, position, organisation, manager, temp manager)?

When people have multiple positions, do they typically fit with that model?

One option we have is to keep the current position types model, but make the position types customisable at the site level and allow unlimited instead of just three options.

A second option would be to remove the position types concept and support multiple positions, organisations, managers etc, but directly attached to the users like other profile fields."

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This feature has been requested by several of our Puiblic Sector customers - there is no real pattern to how people share job roles/positions, several people have 3 roles/positions within the same organisation but with different managers.

I think as long as it's flexible enough to allow for multiple combinations/permutations of pos,org,mgr it'll work well.

Has anyone thought about taking the aspirational position across into competencies? So today I'm a developer, but my aspirational position is a Team Lead.

Competencies for Developer are one,two,three

Competencies for Team Lead are  seven, eight, nine  plus all developer and senior developer competencies

I'm competent in one and two, but missing four, five, six (senior developer), seven, eight, nine (Team Lead)

Which is a training needs analysis. It would be nice if I could create a learning plan as a manager that automatically pulled in the competencies that I need to get to complete to get to my aspirational position."

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This is definitely something we want to do at some point but I see it as a separate issue that we'll need to look at separately (in order to keep the scope of this feature small enough to be achievable).

Once this is implemented though I would imagine that an "aspirational" position could in fact be any position type, there wouldn't be anything special about an aspirational position type other than it was the one selected for this kind of comparison."