Assigning Users to Training
Assign trainings to individual users or groups to ensure the right people receive the right content at the right time
Assigning Trainings Overview
Assigning trainings ensures the right people receive the right content at the right time. With Herd, you assign trainings to individual users or to groups — making distribution simple and flexible.
Assigning to Individuals or Groups
Step 1: From the Training Library, select the training you want to assign.
Step 2: Open the Assignment tab. It has two views: Assign (build a send) and Assigned (everyone who already has the training).
Step 3: In the Add people or groups box, search for people and groups together. Group sources include Okta, Slack, Google, Azure (Entra), and Herd groups, and there's an Everyone unassigned shortcut for a company-wide send. Picking a group adds its members to the selection with a removable source chip, so "Engineering plus three extra people" is one send; removing the chip removes only the people that group alone explains.
Step 4: The selection table shows each person's state before you send: Ready, Reassign (they already have it, so sending resets their progress), Held (waiting on their onboarding delay, with a Send anyway release), or Unreachable · no channel. Filter the table by state, or use Find in selection to locate someone in a large send. Clear all empties the selection in one click, with an Undo on the toast if that was a mistake.
Step 5: Set delivery options in the Delivery rail (they apply to this send only), then check the summary line (for example Sends now to 1,180 · holds 9 · resets 12) and click Send to N people or Queue for N people.
Timing — Send now delivers as soon as it's sent; After current trainings waits until each person finishes the trainings they already have (see Queue Trainings). Outside your organization's business hours, admins also see a Bypass business hours and send immediately toggle; inside business hours the rail simply notes that assignments will be delivered immediately.
Requirements — the Mandatory toggle and its passing-score options, described below.
Recognition — the Completion award toggle, described below.
Group rules — shown when a group is in the selection: Auto-assign new members and Repeat on a schedule (with a Repeats cadence).
Sends to 100 or more people are handed to a background queue so the page returns immediately; those assignments show as Queued in the Assigned view until each one is delivered. Your organization also has a cap on how many people receive a first training message per minute, so a very large assignment goes out in batches. Rows waiting their turn read Queued · Rate limit (N per minute). Nothing is wrong, and they deliver automatically; they can't be nudged until then.
Marking an assignment mandatory
In the Delivery rail, the Mandatory toggle marks the assignment as required. It applies to the selected users only — the same training can be mandatory for some people and optional for others. Mandatory completion feeds directly into each user's human risk score: overdue or late mandatory training raises risk, on-time completion reduces it.
When the toggle is on, an optional Passing score field appears (a whole number 0–100). It overrides the training's quiz passing threshold for these users; leave it blank to use the training's default. Assigned users carry a Mandatory badge (with the passing score when one is set).
Once a passing score is entered, two more quiz-behavior toggles appear:
Fast fail — end the training with a retake prompt as soon as the passing score can no longer be reached, instead of walking the learner through remaining questions that can't change the outcome. The learner sees how many questions they got right so far and why the training ended early.
Restart from beginning — when the quiz is failed, send the user back to the very first step of the training instead of the first quiz step. The retake button becomes Restart Training, and previous quiz answers are cleared so the retake starts fresh.
Delivery warnings (who can actually receive it)
Herd is honest about deliverability before and after you assign:
A selected person with no Slack or Teams account but an email address on file receives the training as an emailed link to the browser player, even if email delivery isn't turned on for your organization. Someone with no chat account and no email is flagged Unreachable · no channel in the selection table; assigning them leaves the training queued until a delivery channel exists.
After assigning, undeliverable people are not counted as successes — the confirmation calls out how many cannot be delivered and why.
Pre-start hires are held automatically. Someone staged in Okta or with a future HRIS hire date won't receive trainings until their start date, regardless of your onboarding-delay setting — after which the normal onboarding delay applies from their actual start. Held users appear with a Send anyway / Send now override if you really want delivery early.
Sending a completion award
Under Recognition in the Delivery rail, the Completion award toggle sends a celebratory, org-branded award when these users complete the training (waiting for the passing score, if one is set). See Completion Awards.
The Assigned view
Switch to Assigned to see everyone who has the training. The view is built for large rosters — it pages through people on the server, so a training assigned to thousands opens as quickly as one assigned to ten:
Summary tiles at the top: Assigned (count), Completed (percentage), Queued, and Needs attention.
Filter chips for each bucket — All, Not started, In progress, Completed, plus Queued and Needs attention when there is anyone in them — each with a count.
An Assignment source toggle (All, Direct, Via track) and a Find a person search box.
The table shows Person, Status, Progress, Assigned, and Via; a Delivery failed pill marks anyone Herd couldn't reach. A Group rules strip shows any group automation with an edit control (a track rule carries a Track badge). Click a row to expand the assignment's details — when it was assigned, Waiting to start or N of M steps, and how it arrived — along with the person's delivery channels and history.
Each row offers Nudge, Add to send, Reassign now, and Remove. Tick rows and the same actions appear as a bulk bar (Nudge, Add to send, Mark mandatory, Remove). Select all shown ticks the current page; to act on everyone who matches the current filters across every page, click select all N matching — the bar then reads All N matching selected (Add to send needs each person loaded on the page, so it stays disabled in that mode). To nudge everyone who still has the training outstanding, use Nudge all · N in the page header.
Reassigning (retraining)
Reassigning is how you re-run a training for someone — for example, an annual refresher or a retake after a failed quiz. Reassigning always resets progress: the user restarts the training from the beginning and previous quiz answers are cleared, so a retake never inherits the earlier attempt's outcome. Their completion history and any issued completion awards are preserved, and mandatory, passing-score, and completion-award settings carry over. There are two ways to do it from the Assigned view:
Reassign now — resends immediately after a confirmation.
Add to send — stages the person into the Assign view (their row reads Reassign) so you can combine them with other people and delivery options, then press Send.
Removing assigned users
Remove people from the Assigned view: choose Remove from a row's menu, or select several rows and click Remove in the bulk toolbar. Either way, Herd asks you to confirm before removing.
Removing a user from a training permanently deletes their progress on it.
Assigning to Your Whole Organization
For a one-time company-wide send, use the Everyone unassigned shortcut in the Assign view. To keep new hires covered automatically, assign the training to a group that contains everyone in your organization instead (for example, a Herd group or your primary directory group):
Step 1: Select the training you'd like to roll out company-wide.
Step 2: On the Assignment tab, add the group that contains your organization.
Step 3: Under Group rules, enable Auto-assign new members. Any user added to that group later — whether it syncs from Okta, Azure AD, Google, or Slack, or is managed in Herd — will automatically receive this training.
Due Dates, Nudges & Escalations
Every training has two tabs for putting a deadline behind the assignment. They share one Due date (the tab says so: Shared by Nudges and Escalations), and everything on them saves automatically a moment after you stop editing — a Saving… / Saved indicator in the card header confirms it, with a Retry link if a save fails.
The Nudges tab — reminders sent to each assignee before and after the due date:
Due date — click Add a due date to set when the training must be finished. Until there is one, the tab reads No due date. Reminders and escalation start once one is set. Setting a due date on a training people already have asks whether to re-date their incomplete assignments; setting one in the past asks Start overdue reminders? before it notifies anyone.
Reminders before the due date — Herd nudges incomplete users 2 weeks, 1 week, and 3 business days before the deadline by default; you can adjust which offsets are used, and optionally remind on the due date itself.
Reminders after the due date — keep nudging overdue users at a chosen frequency (every 3 business days by default).
The Escalations tab — optional; when someone is still overdue, tell their manager or other people so they can follow up:
Escalation — after a number of days overdue, Herd notifies each user's manager and/or specific people you choose, with a customizable escalation message. Pick when to escalate and who to tell; it saves once both are set.
Clear due date turns off both: because the escalation counts from the due date, clearing it stops reminders and escalation together (Herd confirms with Clear the due date? / Turn off both).
How reminders reach people:
Reminders go out at 9 AM in each person's own time zone on business days (taken from their Slack profile; people without one get your organization's business-hours window). Overdue reminders are capped at one per person per day for a given schedule.
Scheduled reminders open with the line Automated reminder from Herd · not part of the training content, so a reminder that lands in a training's thread isn't mistaken for a step.
Herd holds a person's reminders while they're actively working through any training (they finished a step, started a training, or replied in one within the last 30 minutes). The reminder goes out once they've been quiet for 30 minutes, and isn't sent at all if they finish in the meantime. Manager escalations aren't held back.
Each Slack reminder carries a Resend my training button (Teams: Resend current step) that re-delivers the current step into the training thread, and reminders land in that thread rather than as a separate message.
Learners can snooze a reminder with Snooze 1 hour, Snooze 2 hours, or Snooze until tomorrow. A snooze only defers that person's reminders; the due date, escalations, and other people's reminders are unchanged. Timed snoozes resume at exactly that time, even outside business hours; "tomorrow" resumes at the person's normal morning send time.
Manager and escalation messages end with a View in Herd button that opens the training in Herd.
The same two tabs exist on tracks (see Training Tracks), and a compliance campaign's Nudges tab rolls up the setup of every item in it (see Nudges). Reminders for work that lives outside Herd are a separate page: Messaging › Reminders.
A training that contains a Phishing simulation step with no template selected can't be assigned, and neither can a track or compliance campaign that includes such a training. The Assign tab warns — N phishing simulation steps have no template selected. Edit the training and choose a phishing template for each one before assigning it. — and the send is refused until each phishing step has a template.
Once trainings are assigned, continue to the next module to learn how to send them.
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