Departments

A department is a subdivision of your workspace. Three things scope to departments:

1. Course delivery — when a trainer publishes a course, every learner in the chosen department gets that course auto-assigned.
2. Trainer authoring scope — a trainer can only see and edit courses in their own department.
3. AI Training Profile (per-department layer) — each department has its own profile that supplements the company baseline for AI evaluation.

Departments are how the workspace partitions itself for L&D purposes. They’re not org-chart departments — they’re training-delivery groupings. Often they overlap, but not always.

Setting up departments

Super admins create departments at Settings → Departments. Each department has:

• Name — e.g. “Operations”, “Finance”, “Customer Service”
• Description — optional

That’s it. Departments are intentionally minimal; the work happens through associations, not properties.

Assigning users to departments

Every learner belongs to exactly one department (or none). Department assignment happens at:

• Manual user creation — Add User modal includes a department dropdown
• Bulk user upload — .xlsx template includes a Department column
• Editing a user — Users page → click a user → Edit → Department

A learner with no department assigned won’t receive auto-assigned courses. They can still take courses if a super admin manually assigns them, but they’re outside the delivery flow by default.

Trainers, content_managers, auditors, and super_admins also have department assignments, but with different semantics:

• Trainers — can only author courses in their own department.
• Content managers, auditors, super_admins — department is informational, not gating; they see and act on the whole workspace.

Department-level approvers (custom workflows)

When configuring a workflow step, you can restrict the step to a specific department. For example: “Step 2 — Compliance review by an auditor in the Compliance department.” Approvers outside that department won’t see the course in their queue.

This is how Wisteria supports orgs where different content has different review chains — Finance content needs a Finance approver, Operations content needs an Ops approver, etc.

What gets auto-assigned

When a trainer publishes a course, every active learner in the course’s department gets a new assignment row. The assignment has:

• No due date by default (set on the course’s Completion Deadline field if needed).
• Status assigned.
• A timestamp.

The learner sees the course on their dashboard with a “Due in X days” badge if a deadline is set, or no badge if not.

What happens on department change

If a learner is moved from one department to another:

• Currently-assigned courses stay assigned (they don’t lose progress).
• Future-published courses in the new department will auto-assign to them.
• Future-published courses in the old department will no longer auto-assign.

Department change is a recordable event in the audit log.

The “Executive” department

The onboarding wizard prefills an “Executive” department and marks it required. Most organisations want a separate slot for leadership-tier training; the prefill saves a few clicks.

You can rename it, you just can’t have zero departments. The wizard enforces at least one before letting you advance.

When to use multiple departments vs one

• One department works for small organisations (under 30 people) where everyone takes the same training.
• Multiple departments are essential when content varies by function — i.e. when an operations safety briefing isn’t relevant to the finance team.
• Many departments (more than 10) can become hard to maintain. If you find yourself adding a department for every team of three people, consider whether a tag-based approach would work better — tags scale cross-departmental, departments don’t.