Showing posts with label Oracle HCM Cloud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oracle HCM Cloud. Show all posts

Friday, June 10, 2016

Learning Plans - The Swiss Army Knife of Oracle Learning Cloud

Jim manages the Learning & Development team of a large automobile component manufacturing company with a 10,000+ workforce. They have manufacturing plants across 5 locations in Asia, with sales and service offices spread across 20 countries. One of the critical KPIs of the L&D function is to administer multiple mandatory courses with varying eligibility and completion rules. One of his biggest challenges is to deliver Health and Safety compliance certification to over 3,000 employees and contractors working in the manufacturing plants. All these workers have to certify themselves after viewing 3 eLearning courses every 6 months and all new workers have to complete this within the first week of their assignment to the plants. While this is monitored on a weekly basis by site HRs, Jim keeps a constant tab of any non-compliance using their global LMS.

So, if you were to implement Oracle Learning Cloud (Taleo Learn) for Jim, how would you handle this requirement?

Enter Learning Plans


Learning Plans is the swiss army knife of Taleo Learn. Brandish it to deliver any type of program/curriculum based learning. Think of Learning Plan as a container that can pack different types of learning items for specific purposes.
Learning Plans - The Swiss Army Knife of Oracle Learning Cloud

 Let's take the case of Jim to illustrate this. His new hire health and safety training involves a set of 3 eLearning courses that need to be completed within a week of being assigned to the employees. Learning Plan is a way of packaging these 3 courses in one set, setting the required deadline, reminders, notifications and assigning it to required employees. For new employees in sales, Jim has a much larger Learning Plan that involves the new hires attending class room based orientations and field assignments. A Learning Plan can effectively combine multiple types of learning items like eLearning, Class room based training, tests and assessments, offline learning etc.

Auto-Enrollment through Groups

One key element of the Learning Plan functionality is the ability to auto-enroll employees into Learning Plans using dynamic groups. So, Jim can define rules to auto-enroll all manufacturing new hires into the Health and Safety Learning Plan, while to move all Sales new hires into the Sales Learning plan. While reducing the administrative overhead is a benefit brought in by this auto-enrollment feature, a more strategic advantage is the ability to push employees into specific Learning Plans based on their attributes. For eg. let's say you have a Future Manager learning path where high potential employees are enrolled into. Once you identify an employee as eligible for this program in Learn (will need a custom field to indicate this), he/she can be automatically enrolled into the Future Manager Learning Plan.

Well, but remember that Jim also has to assign this plan every six months to his manufacturing employees? How do we do that?

Enter Recurring Learning Plans.....Learning Plans reloaded!
In v16A of the product, Oracle has introduced an enhancement to the Learning Plan feature. Now you can define Learning Plans as "Recurring"
Recurring Learning Plans can be defined to handle recurring learning needs
This feature gives you the ability to recur a Learning plan within a specific interval (defined in days or months) as well as sent reminders before the Learning Plan is to expire. This key enhancement is exactly what customers like that of Jim in industries with heavy compliance requirements will be looking for.

All in all, Learning Plans is an extremely powerful feature that can be creatively used to meet a number of functional use cases. I am sure you will have lot of fun exploring this feature further.

Thursday, December 24, 2015

Transcript widget in Taleo Learn v15C

One of the key themes of Taleo Learn product roadmap is the modernization of dynamic objects, with the introduction of widgets that are responsive in design.The first widget for Learning Plan was introduced in v15A.
In 15C,  a new widget for Transcript has been released. The Transcript Widget can be used to display the Learning History of an employee. As expected, it also has a feature to extract the Learning history to file. 
The need to display an employee's Learning history is a standard requirement in all LMS implementations. Prior to the introduction of the Transcript widget, a Learning history page could be developed in Taleo Learn using a combination of multiple dynamic objects. 
The new widget is a definite improvement for the product, providing an easy way to display Learning history with an improved UI and the ability to extract history to a file.
Let's take a closer look at the widget.

Configuration details
As with most other configuration items in Taleo Learn, the Transcript widget can be also be setup easily with few clicks.
Screenshot of Transcript widget setup
The primary design decisions will be around the type of leaning items that need to be displayed by the widget like Enrollments, Courses, Enrollments etc. This further gives you the ability to design pages displaying history of different learning items.
A feature to note is that the widget also gives the option to display the certificate achieved as well, in case a certificate was tied to the learning item in question.

Front-end display
The new widgets can only be used in the new Learncenter pages. But, it is possible to embed the new Learncenter pages in the traditional page designer as well. The below screenshot displays how the widget will be displayed in the Learncenter.
Screenshot of Transcript widget as shown to an end user
My POV and recommendation to customers
The new transcript widget with it's multiple features is a definite improvement and provides a quick way to display the training history of employees. Existing Taleo Learn customers should look at re-designing their existing Learncentre pages to include the new Transcript (as well as Learning Plan) widget and new customers should only be considering the new widgets for these functionalities. I hope that we will see more functionalities being released as widgets in the coming releases.

Saturday, September 5, 2015

Adding a Widget into the Classic WYSIWYG Page editor in Taleo Learn

With 15A version of Oracle Learn Cloud (formerly Taleo Learn), Oracle has introduced the first version of widgets. Widgets are an alternative to the existing dynamic objects, presented with responsive page design and a much more slick UI. The first (and only) widget available with 15A/15B is the widget for Learning Plans. A sample is given below.


As documented, the widgets can be embedded only into the new page designer introduced with 15A and cannot be directly embedded into the classic WYSISYG pages. But, there is a workaround for you to achieve this. Follow the below steps:

1. Create the Widget
2. Create a Page and embed the Widget in the page
3. Open up the classic WYSIWYG page, where you want to invoke the widget
4. In the HTML section, add the below code:



For Page Number - give the page number generated in step 2
For PageName - give the page name provided in step 2

A sample is given below:

Friday, August 21, 2015

Assignments vs. Enrollments in Taleo Learn

Found this quick reference table in My Oracle Support, that gives an overview of the main differences between Assignments and Enrollments in Taleo Learn. Hope you find it informative!

Saturday, August 1, 2015

Oracle Learn Cloud - Adoption of Oracle Business Intelligence

Oracle Learn Cloud (formerly Taleo Learn) introduced Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) based reports from release 15A. BI Reports are in a beta release with existing Insight Reports still available for customers till end of 2015. With the upcoming Oracle Learn Cloud 15B release, Oracle also introduces the capability to define custom BI reports. For more information on Oracle Learn Cloud 15B release, follow this link.

Monday, July 6, 2015

Disabling "Apply" functionality in Taleo career sections

Quick tip of the day
A number of customers I've worked with have requested to disable the option to apply for internal jobs in a Taleo career section. Most often these customers have unique internal mobility processes that they prefer to retain in existing systems/processes. Yet, they want to use the internal career section feature of Taleo to post jobs and drive employee referrals. 
Another user case is industries where employees do not readily have access to computers or in certain cases do not even have a company e-mail address. In such scenarios, organisations just want to use the Taleo internal career section as a job board to let employees know of the available opportunities and do not want to drive electronic self-service application by employees.

So, how do we achieve this requirement of being able to refer friends on the internal career site without the capability for employees to apply for jobs?

Do not attach any application flow to the Job specific application flow configuration of a career section. If no job specific application flow is attached to a career section, the "Apply" button will not be displayed.
The below figure illustrates the career section configuration to achieve the above requirement.
Leave Job specific application flow blank to remove the "Apply" capability in a career section

Thursday, July 2, 2015

Fusion HCM R10 Release Highlights

Fusion HCM Release 10 documents are available now on the Release Readiness site. Check it out here for a preview of the upcoming features.
And bookmark the Release Readiness site as it's an extremely useful site.

Monday, June 29, 2015

On Oracle Taleo Career Sections

Career Sections is one of the most powerful features of Oracle Talent Acquisition cloud service (formerly known as Taleo). Career Sections are nothing but portals where open jobs are listed, allowing candidates to apply for jobs or refer friends to jobs (similar to the Candidate Gateway concept in PeopleSoft Recruitment module). Career Sections can be designed for internal and external candidates, as well as other participants in the recruitment process like staffing agencies. The flexibility of this feature lies in the fact that customers can design an unlimited number of career sections to cater to specific business scenarios. For eg. customers can have career sections for graduate and professional hires, for career fairs, recruitment events, for internal applications, for different subsidiaries etc.
Career Sections primarily control two aspects of the candidate experience: 

(1) Steps in the application process: This is called as "Application Flow" in Oracle Talent Acquisition Cloud terminology. The Application Flow controls the fields that need to be filled by a candidate during the application process. Every career site offers the capability to have up to 4 application flows: (a) Flow shown to candidates while applying for a job (b) Flow shown to candidates while referring friends to a job (c) Flow shown to candidates while depositing resume or creating a general profile (d) Flow shown to candidates while referring a friend's general profile
Different steps can be attached in the application flow for each of the above business cases. It is to be noted that the Application Flow is highly configurable and has a huge impact on the overall candidate experience. It is possible for us to design a lengthy application process or keep it simple by collecting critical information that will be helpful for screening candidates. Oracle Talent Acquisition cloud also provides the flexibility to break down the application process, where data from the candidate can be collected at different points in time during the selection process. For eg. it is possible to design an initial application form that collects basic candidate data and a supplementary form that collects additional data, which is sent out only to candidates who have cleared interviews. This level of flexibility provided by the product can be used to carefully tailor the overall candidate experience.
Given below are 2 examples of contrasting application flows that can be designed. The first example shows a short application flow which has only 3 steps, while the second application flow has 10 steps collecting most of the information upfront from candidates. 
While designing your application flow, consider the industry, competitive situation of your organisation and characteristics of your potential candidate pool to come up with the optimum application process. For eg. if you are in the technology space competing for millenial talent, it would be prudent to keep the application process short and collect only the most critical information upfront. On the other hand if you are targeting blue collar workers in a region with limited internet connectivity, collecting most information upfront will be a better strategy.

Example of a short application flow

Example of a long application flow


(2) Corporate branding of the career site: Each career section can have specific corporate branding applied. The branding feature can control the header, footer, background, colour, fonts, styles of different elements on the career section like buttons, hover effects etc. Oracle Talent Acquisition Cloud offers the ability for customers to upload branding files with customer specific cascading style sheets (CSS). In a number of implementations, career site branding is an area that is not given the time and importance it should be. The custom branding capabilities offered by the product is immense and can be utilised to provide a superior candidate experience. Given below are some selected examples of career sites running on Oracle Talent Acquisition Cloud, with excellent custom branding:
Additional Points:
  • The standard career section URL will be starting with zonename.taleo.net. Oracle offers a service (called Vanity URL service) which can be used to display a customer specific domain name in the career section URL, so as to eliminate reference to taleo.net
  • Career Sections also offer the capability to generate filtered URLs based on fields within the Oracle Taleo Acquisition suite. This eliminates the need to have multiple career sites for different locations or business units. For eg. let us take a requirement where you need to show jobs specific to a location, business unit or even job family to candidates. Instead of creating separate career sections for each of these categories, Oracle Talent Acquisition Cloud has the capability to generate filtered URLs for these parameters from the same career site.


Oracle Taleo Taleo Recruiting

The Unlearning Times and New Beginnings


After a long hiatus I am back to my blogging desk. The last two years has been a time of new learning and more importantly unlearning for me. The Software as a Service (SaaS) movement turned mainstream over the last two years and it's been an exhilarating experience riding the cloud wave. 
It has been a disruptive period for me; moving from a focus on PeopleSoft HCM to Oracle HCM Cloud suite of products, from projects delivered in years to delivery in weeks, from working on one or two projects at a time to handling multiple projects and more importantly adopting a cloud mindset in delivery. This period of unlearning has left me with little time and quality content to share with you all. I've always believed that it's important for me to write posts that matter, posts that give insights deeper than what the user guides provide. That comes only from experience. Two years into the new product suite and after being part of most of the initial Oracle HCM Cloud wins and implementations in the ASEAN region, I feel it's time for me to start sharing my learning and experience on the journey so far. And to all my PeopleSoft HCM friends - it's important to realise that the shift in HR Technology business and more importantly, the shift in customer preference for HR technology is REAL. Have an open mind and embrace the change!