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Re: Training database concept how to relate records

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Randy_Batchelor
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

Hi all,

I want to build a base for tracking the onboarding and ongoing training of employees at our company. We have a list of “SOPs” standards and guides. I’ll just call them SOPs here. There are actually several lists (one for engineering, one for accounting, one for HR stuff, etc). These lists currently reside in a series of google sheets that have columns to describe what the SOP is for, who “owns” it, what the status of it is and its priority for training purposes and a link to it (in google drive). Then there is a master list that links out to the other lists. The challenge is that I want to track how well each employee on the team knows a particular standard, and if it is a priority for them to learn it. And it doesn’t make sense to do that in the spreadsheet format. I want to transition this to an Airtable base that relates a table with our employees (a row/record for each employee) to a table with the SOPs. So for each employee there would be a few fields that define: their level of training with regards to a particular SOP, if it’s a priority for them to learn it, and notes or question they have about it. 

I am having a sort of block about how best to do this… I could add 2 or 3 new fields on the SOP list for each employee, but that seems cumbersome. Or I am wondering if I should have a 3rd table that has the 3 fields (priority, level of learning, and notes) and then has a record that relates each SOP to each employee. But then I guess I would need to build out an automation that creates a new record in this 3rd table for every SOP whenever we add a new employee? And when we add a new SOP we would need to create a new record for each employee…

open to suggestions here!

I am pretty savvy with Airtable, and we use it heavily already as a CRM and project tracking database, but this is a new use case and new base for us and I’m not really sure where to start with this one, or how to even search for it, so thought I’d ask for suggestions.

1 Reply 1

You should definitely do it the third table way. If you ever find yourself having to add fields to a table that are specific to a record in another table, then you've probably got your structure wrong.