Dear hive mind,
I have loads of individual skills (not personally, they’re in a nicely ordered and referenced framework covering lots of people). I’d like to present them in a way that lets people choose from them to create a course (with hyperlinks to more details and perhaps even course content). I then need to be able to look at the resulting courses to see which people need which individual skills and therefore which skills are required most regularly. This seems pretty complicated from where I am stood, but I have the feeling that one of you will point out how blindingly simple it is. 😀
I imagine Excel is the solution, but it doesn’t have to be. Help please!

I imagine Excel is the solution

I am fairly sure you are wrong! Whilst I dare say you could try to make something work in excel, it is rarely the correct solution for anything other than accounting!

I’m not entirely sure I understand the problem you are solving. Nowhere do you describe how long it will take the resource to fulfil the training objective – which is presumably an important element, and nowhere do you consider if the resource is needed in two places at once.

You could create a table in Excel of all the courses, let them tick boxes for skills and have it email you a summary of what they’ve chosen…

Hi Poly, you’re probably right about Excel, but I can’t think of an alternative at present… In answer to the question, I’m not really trying to deliver the training using this, just organise it so the timings are not relevant. The individual skills do need to be used in lots of different courses – I just want it to allow people to select from a long list to create their own shorter list. It doesn’t really matter that they’re skills – they could be bananas I suppose..!

monkey – the “right” way will be to use a database. Since presumably the people you are training are not local to you – probably a web based database, with the default answer being SQL (e.g. mySQL is free). Your learning curve sounds like it could be high though.

How many trainees, trainers, and individual skills are we talking here?

Hi all, thanks for your replies they’ve been useful. They’ve made me reframe the question – I’d like to let people choose from a huge menu, with let’s say a hundred items, from say ten categories. I then need to know which ones are popular, and offer some people’s choices as ‘set menus’. It’ll be handy if they could click a link on each menu item to see a picture of the dish or a short description. It probably sounds completely different, but your answers have made me realise that is actually what I’m after, so thank you!

How about setting it up using one of the online survey providers? You probably won’t get all that functionality on the free version though, if that’s an issue.