10. Your first week as an admin

Your first week as an admin

This is for new 5Mins admins who have worked through the first seven articles and want to turn that into a real first week. By the end you'll have a short, ordered list of things to do, and know where to go when you hit something the course did not cover.

Before you start

  • Finish articles 1 to 7. This one is a recap and a plan, so it assumes you have already done the steps.

  • Have your admin portal open in another tab. Most of the checklist below is 5 minutes of clicking each.

Four things you can now do

The course had four jobs. Here they are, with the article that taught each one, in case you want to go back over any of them.

  1. Invite people into the platform. Individually or in bulk from a CSV. Taught in article 2, Get your people in.

  2. Enrol people into a course. Put the right content in front of the right group. Taught in article 5, Enrol people into a course.

  3. Read completion data. Reports → Course Completion, with its tiles for completed, in progress, at risk, and overdue, plus a breakdown by course, category, team, or region. Taught in article 6, See what's landing: course completion.

  4. Export learning records. Filter Learning Records down to what you need, then Download Report for the CSV. Taught in article 7, Get the data out: Learning Records.

Two more articles round out the picture. Article 1, Welcome to 5Mins: how it all fits together, covers the admin sidebar: Home, People & Teams, Content & Courses, Reports, Skills, Learning Records, Events, and Account & Settings. Article 3, Organise people into teams and managers, and article 4, Lessons and courses: how content works, cover the structure that makes enrolment and reporting worth doing.

Your first-week checklist

Work down this list in order. Each step makes the next one easier, and none of it is permanent, so a first pass is better than a perfect plan.

  1. Get a small group of people in first. Invite a handful of colleagues rather than your whole organisation. A small group is much easier to fix if something is set up wrong.

  2. Create the teams you already talk about. Use the names your organisation uses day to day. Team names can be changed later, and people can be moved between teams at any time.

  3. Set who reports to whom. Managers are created by setting other people's manager, not by creating a manager record. You can set Reports to at invite time or through the reports_to column in a CSV upload, which is faster for a large group.

  4. Look at the content before you assign it. Open a course, read what is in it, and decide who it is genuinely for.

  5. Run one real enrolment. Pick one course and one team. One clean enrolment teaches you more than five speculative ones.

  6. Bring the rest of your people in. Once the small group has worked, the CSV upload is the faster route for everyone else.

  7. Check Course Completion after a few days. Learners need time to actually do something. Come back to Reports → Course Completion once there is behaviour to look at.

  8. Pull one export. Go to Learning Records, filter to the course you enrolled, and download the CSV. Doing this once while it does not matter means you are not learning it under pressure when someone asks for an audit.

  9. Decide who else needs admin access. Being the only admin is a single point of failure. Work out now who your second pair of hands is.

What you should see by the end of the week

  • Your people are in the platform, grouped into teams, with reporting lines set.

  • At least one course is enrolled to a real group of learners.

  • Course Completion shows real numbers, not zeros.

  • You have downloaded at least one CSV from Learning Records and know what is in it.

Common questions

I've done all this. What is the next thing to learn?
The parts of the sidebar this course did not cover: Skills, Events, and Account & Settings. You now know the shape of the portal well enough to explore them without getting lost.

Something in my setup is wrong. Have I broken it?
Almost certainly not. Team names can be changed, people can be moved between teams, and a person's manager can be updated at any time. Most first-week mistakes are a two-minute fix.

Where do I go for help beyond this course?
The 5Mins help centre has an article for each individual task, in more depth than a crash course can go. Start there, and if the answer is not in it, contact your 5Mins customer success contact.

That's the course

You started not knowing where anything lived. You can now get people into 5Mins, organise them, put content in front of them, see what is landing, and get the data out to whoever asks for it. That is the whole core admin job, and everything else builds on it.

Keep this checklist somewhere you can find it, come back to any article whenever you need the steps again, and welcome to 5Mins.