How Many Courses Do We Need? Count Roles, Not Topics

Counting courses pushes you toward topics: customer service, safety, the register, the menu. A topic catalog keeps growing, and a new hire still has to work out which parts matter on Tuesday's shift. A role path answers a narrower question: what does this person need to do on their own, and in what order? That question has an end, and you can tell when you have reached it. It also gives you a number worth knowing: the count of roles you hire into, which is the number of paths you will eventually need.

Rank your roles before you build anything. Three facts decide the order, and you already know all of them. The role with the most hires and the costliest mistakes goes first. It may well be a frontline role such as a cashier, a counter clerk or a crew member. A role you fill once every few years can wait, even if it is senior, because its next hire will learn from the person leaving it or from you.

• How many people you hire into the role in a year.
• What a mistake in that role costs: a lost customer, waste, rework or risk.
• Who trains the role today, and how much of their week it takes.

List the tasks, not the topics. Write down everything a person in the role does in a normal week, then mark what a new hire must do alone in the first days. If you get stuck, O*NET OnLine, the occupational database sponsored by the Department of Labor, publishes task lists for more than nine hundred occupations. Use it as a prompt, then cross out what your business does not do and add what is unique to you. OSHA's resource on worker training makes a related point. It recommends a needs assessment before the training, so the training meets the needs of the people taking it.

Not every task needs a lesson. Decide each task with this table, then add up what you have. The total is the first path for that role, and anything marked for later waits until the first path is in use.

When it cuts across roles and barely changes from one role to the next. Your service standard, how you open and close, and the basics of your products can be shared lessons that every path borrows. Some topics are not yours to design. OSHA's booklet on training requirements notes that many OSHA standards include explicit safety and health training requirements.

For any training a regulation requires, check the applicable rule for what the content must cover, who is qualified to deliver it and which records you must keep. Elvina does not replace mandatory compliance training or provide certification. For the shared lessons you do design, keep each one short and link it from every path, so a change made in one place reaches every role.

A fictional food truck business runs a few trucks and a small commissary kitchen. The owner's first list was a long row of topic courses, from food costing to social media. After ranking her roles, she built a short path for each role instead.

• Window cashier: taking orders, the card reader, allergen questions and the end-of-shift count, with a job aid taped inside the window.
• Line cook: the menu build on the truck, holding times and the closing cleanup.
• Commissary prep: the prep list, labeling and loading the truck for service.
• Driver and setup lead: the pre-trip walk-around, parking setup and starting the generator.
• Shared lessons on the service standard and opening steps sit in every path, and food costing stayed with the owner.
• Each path is a handful of lessons that a new hire can finish before or during the first shifts.

If you already own a library, sort it against the role lists before you build anything new. Each course lands in one of three piles, and only the last pile needs work from you. Do this with the person who does the job, because they will spot outdated steps faster than you will.

• Keep: it teaches a task on a role list, matches how the work is done today and has an owner.
• Cut or archive: nobody in the role does the task early, or the topic is too general to change anything on a shift.
• Rebuild: the task is on a list, but the material is long, out of date or generic, so use it as a source for a shorter lesson.

Add to a path when something tells you to, not on a schedule. These triggers are worth acting on as soon as you see them. Each one points to a specific task or role, so the addition stays as small as the trigger.

• A mistake repeats after the first attempts were checked.
• A process, a tool or the menu changes.
• You add a role, a location or a service.
• A new hire passes the first path and needs the next level.
• Experienced staff keep answering the same question.

Measure whether the paths are the right size, not how many lessons exist. Check these after each new hire finishes a path. If coverage is complete and new hires still struggle, the problem is the quality of the lessons or the checks, not their number.

• How much of the role's first-week task list is covered by a lesson, a job aid or a check.
• Lessons nobody opened in the last quarter, which are the first ones to cut.
• Questions new hires still bring to a senior employee, sorted by task.
• First attempts that pass the observed check for each covered task.
• Time from a process change to an updated lesson.

Capturing your procedures, checklists and recordings in Company Knowledge is available now, and so is turning each task into a draft lesson, job aid or quiz in Creation Studio. Approval by a person before each piece goes out is available now. Templates that keep every path in the same shape are available now. Assigning paths by role or group on the Learning Platform and showing progress are available now. If you already run a learning system, export of courses as SCORM or xAPI is available now. Our team builds the first paths with you on the platform today, and Elvina takes on each step after it is confirmed.

How many courses do we need? Start with a single path for the role you hire most often, built from the tasks a new hire does alone in the first days. Add paths for other roles in order of hiring volume and the cost of mistakes. Shared lessons, like your service standard, can sit in every path.

• Should we buy a ready-made course library? A library can cover general skills, like customer service basics or common software, but it cannot teach your procedures, products or standards. Use it for the shared, generic part if it fits, and build the role paths from your own sources.
• How long should a role path be? Long enough to cover the tasks a new hire must do alone in the first days, and no longer. If a path has lessons nobody opens, or tasks a new hire never does early, cut them or move them to the next level.

Public sources, checked on the date shown.

• O*NET OnLine, sponsored by the Department of Labor, holds over 900 occupation profiles and more than 19,000 task statements. Source: https://www.onetonline.org/help/onet/ (checked 2026-10-02).
• OSHA's booklet Training Requirements in OSHA Standards states that many OSHA standards include explicit safety and health training requirements. Source: https://www.osha.gov/sites/default/files/publications/OSHA2254.pdf (checked 2026-10-02).
• OSHA's worker training resource recommends a needs assessment before safety and health training so the training meets participants' needs. Source: https://www.osha.gov/sites/default/files/publications/OSHA3824.pdf (checked 2026-10-02).