Developing Coursy: the efficient way to train your employees

Imagine having to ensure that all of the thousands of people who work for your company have had all of the training, re-training, and certifications they need in order to be eligible to fill their role. How would you go about managing all of this, while ensuring that nothing is missed?

Well, for the past 20 years, HR managers have had two Excel spreadsheets: one had all of the information about the training any particular role had to complete and the other had info about people filling those roles and whether or not they had had a chance to complete the training. As you can imagine, it’s time-consuming, a logistical headache, and impractical. Here’s where Coursy, originally created and developed by Opus and now operating as an independent company, comes into play.

Coursy’s aim is to digitise the space of professional development and learning, while ensuring that everyone eligible has the tools at their disposal to participate in workshops, seminars, or lectures organised by their company.

“Coursy ties everything into a single ecosystem – it offers HR the ability to monitor participation, employees can see any courses available to them, and it enables people to learn remotely, without the need to take a day to travel to a training center. Everything can be available via their smart devices,” said Coursy’s product manager Janne Laanmets.

To enable all this, Opus’s development team had to build the solution from the ground up. Having been an active development project for several years now, some of the tech stack used within the tool is ready to be migrated to newer and better pastures. However, the fundamentals still hold up well.

Margus Eha, CEO of Opus, explained that with Coursy, it was important to create a resilient, easily scalable, and extremely robust system that could cope with thousands of simultaneous users – it’s not rare to see companies with more than 5,000 employees using Coursy’s services to manage the development of their employees.

For this reason, the backend of the application was built with PHP, while the frontend is based on Angular. Today, preparations are underway to migrate the frontend to React.

“When working on Coursy, it was incredibly important for everyone that we kept the future in mind. While at first it was based on the needs of a few individual customers, we knew it wouldn’t stay like that,” said Eha. “As such, we had to develop it in a way that we didn’t paint ourselves into a corner once additional features and functions were added. This was important both in respect to the code, as well as to the underlying business logic.”

This approach has already been put to the test, with Coursy ever-evolving. For example, today the system has evolved to be more automatic than ever. “After setting it up, Coursy can automatically keep track of employee’s training, attended courses, and a lot more. For HR personnel, this can save huge amounts of time,” said Laanmets.

These are not the only time-saving features that Opus’s developers introduced to the tool. For example, Coursy’s clients have been incredibly fond of the functionality that allows them to generate attendance reports and have participants sign them with their finger via a tablet. “This might seem small, but in the end, it makes everyone’s lives a lot easier,” noted Laanmets.

Today, Coursy’s development continues in co-operation between Opus’s team and Coursy’s in-house development staff.

Want to join our team? Take a look at our open positions. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!