What this is
What is a course catalogue?
What is a course catalogue?
A course catalogue is the master register of training courses: each entry carries a stable course ID, the course name, type, duration, validity period, refresher and assessment rules, pass mark and provider. Every training record and competency matrix refers back to it, so the rule about when a qualification expires is stated once, in one place, rather than re-derived in every spreadsheet that mentions the course.
Why is the course catalogue a singleton register?
Because it is master data, not an event record. There is one catalogue per organisation, set up once and maintained as courses are added, changed or retired, and every other template reads from it by course ID. Two catalogues, or a catalogue plus a shadow spreadsheet, means two versions of the truth about expiry, and the audit will find the version the matrix was not reading.
What does the validity period actually control?
It is the single number that turns a training record into a live or lapsed qualification. When a worker completes a course, their record inherits the catalogue's validity months to compute an expiry date, and the competency matrix and gap reports flow from that. Zero means the course never expires, which is a legitimate answer for a one-off induction and a dangerous default for everything else.
Scope
When is a course catalog required?
The catalogue defines courses; it does not evidence, evaluate or map them. Each of those jobs belongs to a neighbouring template, and pushing them into the register turns clean master data into a spreadsheet with opinions.
Use this template when
- The workspace is being set up and the training courses in circulation need to be listed once, with IDs other records can reference
- A new course is introduced, an existing one changes its duration, validity, pass mark or provider, or a course is retired
- A regulation, customer requirement or insurer condition changes the refresher interval for a legally required course
- Training records or the competency matrix are being connected to a single source of expiry rules instead of per-department spreadsheets
- An external provider changes, so the course entry must point at the newly approved vendor before bookings continue
Do not use it for
- Recording that a person attended or completed training, which is the training record and the E-Learning Completion Record (TRN-082); the catalogue defines the course, not the event
- Mapping which competencies each role requires, which is the Competency Framework Register (FDN-027); the catalogue's Required For Roles field is the coarse link, the framework is the authority
- Holding worker-level data, role, department, site, start date, which is the Worker Profile (FDN-003)
- Judging whether the training changed anything, which is the Training Effectiveness Evaluation (TRN-083) and the knowledge checks
- Reviewing whether course content is still correct after a procedure change, which is the Training Material Review (TRN-084)
Compliance mapping
Which ISO 45001 cl.7.2 requirements does this satisfy?
No regulation demands a course catalogue by name. What the standards demand is determined competence and retained evidence, and what specific regulations demand is named training at named intervals; a maintained catalogue is how both are answered from one place instead of reconstructed under audit.
| Clause | Requirement | Where it lands |
|---|---|---|
| ISO 45001 cl.7.2 | Determine necessary competence, ensure competence on the basis of education, training or experience, take actions to acquire and maintain it, and retain documented evidence | Requirements |
| ISO 45001 cl.7.5 | Documented information must be identified, current, available where needed and protected against unintended alteration | Identification |
| ISO 9001 cl.7.2 | Competence determined and evidenced for persons whose work affects quality performance | Requirements |
| ISO 9001 cl.8.4 | Externally provided processes and services, including external training providers, controlled and evaluated | Delivery |
| OSHA 1910.178(l) | Powered industrial truck operators trained, evaluated, and re-evaluated at least once every three years | Requirements |
| MHSWR 1999 reg.13 (GB) | Adequate health and safety training on recruitment and on change of risk, repeated periodically where appropriate | Requirements |
| Framework Directive 89/391/EEC art.12 | Workers receive adequate safety and health training on recruitment, transfer, new equipment and new technology, repeated periodically if necessary | Requirements |
What it does not cover
- Training records, which evidence that a named person completed a named course on a date with a result; the catalogue defines the course those records point at.
- Competency Framework Register, which maps roles to required competencies and proficiency levels; Required For Roles in the catalogue is a routing aid, not the framework.
- Training Effectiveness Evaluation, which asks whether behaviour on the floor changed; a course existing in the catalogue says nothing about whether it works.
- Training Material Review, which keeps the course content aligned with current procedures; the catalogue tracks the course's existence and rules, not its accuracy.
- Vendor approval, which lives in the Vendor and Contractor Register; the catalogue's provider pick list reads approved vendors, it does not approve them.
Global
Course Catalog requirements by country
The catalogue itself is nowhere mandated; the training it lists frequently is. What differs by jurisdiction is which courses are legally required, whether refresher intervals are fixed in regulation, and how much evidence the regulator expects to see retained.
OSHA standard-specific training requirements
No general training standard; dozens of standards carry named training duties, some with fixed re-evaluation intervals such as the three-year forklift rule.
Where OSHA fixes an interval, the catalogue's validity months is not a policy choice, and an entry that disagrees with the standard is a documented decision to be out of compliance.
HSWA 1974 s.2(2)(c); MHSWR 1999 reg.13
General duty to provide information, instruction and training, with repetition periodically where appropriate; few fixed intervals in law.
Because intervals are mostly the employer's judgement, the defensible position is a recorded rationale per course, which is what the catalogue's validity and regulatory fields hold.
Framework Directive 89/391/EEC art.12
Training required on recruitment, transfer and change of equipment or technology, repeated periodically if necessary, at no cost to the worker and during working time.
Member state implementations add sector-specific named courses, so a multi-country catalogue needs the regulatory requirement recorded per course, per country.
Provincial OHS acts; WHMIS 2015
Provincial training duties plus federally harmonised hazardous product training; some provinces certify specific courses such as working at heights with fixed validity.
Ontario's working at heights training, for example, carries a three-year validity set by the regulator, which belongs in the catalogue verbatim rather than approximated.
Model WHS Act s.19; high risk work licensing
Primary duty includes provision of training; specified classes of high risk work require licences with renewal periods set by regulation.
Licensed competencies renew on the regulator's calendar, not the employer's, so those catalogue entries mirror an external rule the organisation cannot vary.
ISO 45001 cl.7.2; ISO 9001 cl.7.2
Management system requirement to determine competence, ensure it, and retain documented evidence.
Certification auditors trace from a sampled worker to the competence requirement to the evidence, and the catalogue is the middle link that either holds or does not.
How to complete it
How to complete a course catalog, step by step
Filling the fields is clerical. What decides whether the register is worth having is a handful of judgements about where each number came from and what happens to the entry over time.
Each validity months value has exactly one of three sources: a regulation or licence condition, an external requirement such as an insurer or customer, or your own judgement about how fast the competence decays. The Regulatory Requirement field should name the first kind explicitly, because those numbers are not yours to change, and an auditor who finds a regulated interval softened in the catalogue has found a system-level failure, not a typo.
Zero validity means never expires, and it should appear only where that is genuinely true. The honest test for each zero: if this person performed the task ten years from now with no refresher, would you defend that in an investigation? Site inductions often pass the test; anything involving energy, height, chemicals or food safety rarely does.
Historic training records reference the course ID, so deleting an entry orphans evidence and renaming one rewrites history. When content changes materially, retire the old entry, create a successor with a new ID, and let the pick-list filter on status take the retired course out of circulation. The retired entry keeps doing its one remaining job: explaining what the old records meant.
One catalogue entry per distinct competence outcome, not per provider, per site or per delivery run. When Forklift Operation exists three times because two sites and an external provider each got their own entry, the training history splits three ways and the matrix reports gaps that are artefacts of the register. Provider and delivery method are fields on the course, not reasons for another course.
What auditors find
Most common course catalog findings
Catalogue findings rarely start in the catalogue. They start when an auditor traces one sampled worker's qualification backwards and the chain of course ID, validity and requirement fails to hold.
| Finding | Clause | What fixes it |
|---|---|---|
| Validity period in the catalogue disagrees with the interval fixed in the regulation the course exists to satisfy. | OSHA 1910.178(l) | Align the entry to the regulated interval and record the instrument in the Regulatory Requirement field. |
| Same course held under two or more IDs, splitting the training history across duplicates. | ISO 45001 cl.7.5 | Merge to one surviving ID, retire the duplicates, and repoint the matrix before the next expiry run. |
| Expiry rules also maintained in an HR spreadsheet that disagrees with the register the matrix reads. | ISO 45001 cl.7.5 | Declare the catalogue authoritative, delete the shadow copy, and route change requests through the register. |
| Retired courses still Active and still selectable when new training records are raised. | ISO 45001 cl.7.2 | Set status on retirement and rely on the pick-list status filter to remove them from circulation. |
| Validity of zero on safety-critical courses with no recorded justification. | MHSWR 1999 reg.13 | Review every zero-validity entry and either justify it in writing or set the interval the risk supports. |
| Legally required course carries a blank Regulatory Requirement field, so nobody knows the interval is not discretionary. | ISO 45001 cl.7.2 | Name the regulation on the entry; the field exists so the constraint travels with the course. |
| External provider on the course is not on the approved vendor register, or approval has lapsed. | ISO 9001 cl.8.4 | The provider pick list already filters to approved vendors; fix the vendor record rather than typing around it. |
| Assessment Required is checked but no pass mark is recorded, so completion and competence are indistinguishable. | ISO 45001 cl.7.2 | Set the pass mark on the entry so the training record has a threshold to evidence against. |
| Required For Roles never updated after a reorganisation, so gap reports describe the previous structure. | ISO 45001 cl.7.2 | Add role-mapping review to the change process for reorganisations, alongside the competency framework. |
| Course content revised after a procedure change but the catalogue entry, duration and material file are the old version. | ISO 45001 cl.7.5 | Link Training Material Review outcomes to the entry and update duration and material on the same change. |
Case in point
Case in point: the green matrix and the lapsed licences
A logistics operator ran forklift training on a thirty-six month cycle, recorded in the course catalogue, and their competency matrix computed expiry from it. After a run of near misses, their insurer made a twenty-four month evaluation a condition of renewal. The safety manager agreed, and the training coordinator updated the interval, in the HR team's planning spreadsheet, which is where refresher bookings were scheduled from. The catalogue entry stayed at thirty-six.
For a year the system looked healthy from both sides. HR booked refreshers on the new cycle for the operators they remembered, and the matrix showed green because it was reading the register's thirty-six months. Then a customer audit sampled eight operators against the insurer condition. Five were inside twenty-four months because HR had caught them; three were at month twenty-nine, working daily, showing current on every report the site could produce.
The finding was not that training had lapsed; it was that the organisation could not say which of its two expiry rules was real. The corrective action changed the plumbing, not the people: the catalogue was declared the single source of validity, the insurer condition was written into the entry's regulatory field, the HR spreadsheet was retired, and refresher scheduling was pointed at the register's expiry dates. The three operators were re-evaluated within the week; the two-truths problem had taken a year to build.
The template
The template, field by field
The form exactly as it installs. Every field, option, score and conditional rule is editable, and the links to other templates come with it.
3 sections
- Reference
- FDN-007
- Archetype
- Register
- Record ID
- CRS-2026-000
- Scoring
- None
- Direction
- n/a
- Singleton
- Yes
- Basis
- ISO 45001 cl.7.2
- Links
- Referenced by KnowTrain
- Tags
- Master data, Competency
- Sections
- 3
- Fields
- 17
- Follow up fields
- 0
- Repeating sections
- 0
- Links out
- 1
Identification
6 fieldsCourse ID*
Format CRS-000.
The record's own ID. Other templates point at this value.
Status*
Course Name*
This is what Pick Lists display.
Course Type*
Induction, safety, equipment, quality or refresher.
Delivery Method*
Classroom, online, on the job or blended.
Duration Hours*
Requirements
6 fieldsRequired For Roles*
Drives the competency matrix and gap reporting.
- Yes2 pts
- No0 pts
- N/Aexcluded from denominator
Validity Months*
Zero means it does not expire.
Refresher Required*
Assessment Required*
Pass Mark Percent
Regulatory Requirement
Name the regulation if this course is legally required.
Delivery
5 fieldsProvider Type*
Internal or external.
Provider
Vendor ID
Links to FDN-005 Vendor ID
Cost Per Person
Course Material
FDN-007 · record IDs look like CRS-2026-000 · Referenced by KnowTrain
Open in KnowellaRun it with agents
From a document you fill in to a programme that runs itself
A register is only as good as its maintenance, and maintenance is exactly what slips: the interval changed in the wrong place, the duplicate nobody merged, the retired course still taking bookings, and the role mapping frozen at the last reorganisation.
Reads the catalogue as the single source of validity and role requirements, computes expiry on every training record from it, and drives the competency matrix and gap reports from one set of rules.
Ties entries with a named regulatory requirement to the standards register, so a regulation or licence-condition change surfaces every course whose interval it governs.
Keeps the provider pick list honest by holding external training vendors against their approval status, so a lapsed provider stops appearing on new entries.
Watches the register for drift, duplicate names, zero-validity safety courses, dormant Active entries, blank pass marks where assessment is required, and raises the housekeeping before an audit does.
This template lives in General — control tower. The orchestration layer. Registries and engines every other workspace reads from.
Meet General→Glossary
Course Catalog definitions and key terms
- Master data
- Reference data that other records point at rather than copy: the course exists once, and training records, matrices and reports read it by ID.
- Singleton register
- A register that exists once per organisation, set up at the start and maintained thereafter, rather than raised per event like a permit or an inspection.
- Validity period
- The months a completed course remains current before it lapses; the number that converts a training record into a live or expired qualification.
- Refresher
- Repeat training required before or at expiry to keep a qualification current, distinct from retraining triggered by an incident or observed deficiency.
- Competency matrix
- The grid of people against required courses or competencies, computed from training records and the catalogue's validity rules, showing who is current, lapsing or missing.
- Retired course
- A catalogue entry taken out of circulation by status rather than deletion, preserved so historic training records that reference its ID remain interpretable.
- Pass mark
- The assessment threshold that separates attendance from demonstrated competence; without one, a completion record evidences presence, not ability.
- Registry drift
- The gradual divergence between a register and reality, or between a register and its shadow copies, as changes are made somewhere other than the authoritative record.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions about course catalog
Do we really need a course catalogue if we already have an LMS?+
You need one authoritative course list, and the question is where it lives. If the LMS holds validity rules, role requirements and provider data for every course, including the classroom, toolbox and on-the-job training an LMS usually ignores, it is your catalogue. In practice most LMS installations cover e-learning only, and this register is where the whole picture, all delivery methods, one set of expiry rules, is consolidated.
Who should be allowed to change a validity period?+
The training coordinator, through the register, with the source of the number recorded. The change itself is small; the discipline that matters is that nobody, HR, a site manager, an external provider, changes an interval anywhere else and considers it done. Where the interval is regulated or an insurer condition, the entry should say so, because that number is not the organisation's to soften.
Should refreshers be separate catalogue entries or the same course?+
The same course, with Refresher Required checked, where the refresher renews the same competence: completing it resets the same expiry clock. A separate entry is justified only when the refresher is genuinely a different competence outcome, an abbreviated recertification with its own regulatory identity, for example. Separate entries for the same competence split the history and confuse the matrix.
What do we do with courses nobody has run in years?+
Retire them, deliberately. A catalogue full of dormant Active courses hides the live requirement set and keeps dead options in every pick list. Before retiring, check whether the course is still named as required for any role; if it is, the finding is not a stale entry, it is a training requirement the organisation has silently stopped meeting.
How should we handle the same course delivered by two providers?+
One entry, one course ID; the provider is an attribute, not an identity. If the two providers genuinely deliver different content to different outcomes, they are different courses and should say so in the name. The test is the competence: if a worker trained by either provider is equally qualified, splitting the entry only splits the evidence.
Does an auditor actually look at the catalogue?+
Rarely directly, which is the trap. Auditors sample workers and trace: what does this role require, is this person current, what says so. The catalogue is the middle of every one of those chains, so its errors surface as someone else's finding, a lapsed operator, an unexplained expiry date, a requirement nobody can source. A clean catalogue is invisible in an audit; a drifted one is everywhere.
Keep going
Related templates and programmes
Industries this is written for
Programmes this belongs to
Used together in Training Delivery and Effectiveness
Slips Trips and Falls Talk
A short talk on preventing slips, trips and falls, with site photographs
Manual Handling Talk
A short talk on lifting, carrying and using handling aids
Line of Fire Talk
A short talk on staying out of the path of moving equipment, loads and stored energy
Hand Safety Talk
A short talk on protecting hands from cuts, crushes and pinch points
Housekeeping Talk
A short talk on keeping work areas clear, clean and organised
Forklift Pedestrian Safety Talk
A short talk on how pedestrians and powered vehicles share space safely
More in Registries
Site and Location Register
Holds every site, building, area and zone your organisation operates
Asset Register
Holds every piece of equipment, machine, vehicle and tool you track
Worker Profile
Holds a record for each worker, including role, department, site and start date
Job and Task Register
Lists the jobs and tasks people perform, so risk assessments and ergonomic assessments can be tied to real work rather than job titles
Vendor and Contractor Register
Holds every supplier, contractor and service provider you work with, including their status and approval level
Chemical and Substance Register
Lists every chemical and hazardous substance held on site, with quantity, location and hazard class
Written and reviewed by
Siddarth Singh
Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Knowella
Certified Safety Professional and industrial and systems engineer with more than a decade inside food supply chain, freight and manufacturing operations. This page was written against the current text of the standards it cites, not against secondary summaries of them.
- Certified Safety Professional (CSP), Board of Certified Safety Professionals
- MBA, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
- MS and BS, The Ohio State University, Industrial and Systems Engineering
- Six Sigma Black Belt
Sources and last review. Reviewed 16 August 2026 against:
- ISO 45001:2018 clauses 7.2 and 7.5
- ISO 9001:2015 clauses 7.2 and 8.4
- OSHA 29 CFR 1910.178(l), powered industrial truck operator training and three-year evaluation
- Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, regulation 13 (GB)
- Framework Directive 89/391/EEC, article 12, training of workers
- Model WHS Act section 19 and high risk work licensing provisions (Australia)
This page is general guidance, not legal advice. Confirm requirements with your jurisdiction’s regulator.