Hey guys,

How do you handle graduates who have, say, an undergrad and a postgrad qualification.

Currently, there's only room for one qualification in the Primary Eduction Information dialogue. We've been considering using as 'subject of study' attribute, but that seems to make a mockery of the screen which is intended to hold the graduate's information (class of, subject of study, department etc).

Everything I can think of seems like a pretty poor hack and makes the records relatively difficult to search.

Are there any options available for having multiple qualification on one record? We could even have a Degree, Masters and Ph.D for one constituent.

Any tips?

Thanks,
Pete
 

When someone has multiple degrees, each degree should have its own education record so that you can record information specific to that degree.  Since only one education record can be "primary", you'll need to define criteria for determining which of multiple records to make primary.  At my last employer, the hierarchy was

1)  Constituent-Specified (if the alum specifically requested one degree be listed as primary).

2)  Professional degree (such as MD or JD).

3)  First degree.

Of course the primary eduction was always evaluated with respect to our institution.  If they received a Bachelors somewhere else and then received a Masters at our university, the Masters was listed as the primary record.

You'll want to make sure that one of the degrees from your institution is marked as primary.  It's fairly simple to do this.  Just create a query of constituents with a degree from your university that is not primary and subtract from that using "merge queries" a query of constituents with a degree from your university that is marked primary.  The merge results will give you people with a degree from your university where the primary education is from a different university or is not marked.

After your clean-up, your first query (non-primary education) will select people with multiple degrees from your institution, or to play it safer, you can merge the two queries (non-primary and primary) using the AND operator to give you people with multiple degrees.

Drew

Superb, thankyou. I can see this working, as it'll make direct querying much easier to handle.

My next task is altering 80,000 historic records to suit this method. Not looking forward to that one.

Thanks again :)