How roles and visibility work
Two separate things decide what an administrator can do. Their role decides which actions they are allowed to take. Their visibility decides which people those actions apply to. Getting one right and the other wrong is what produces an administrator who can open a page and find nothing on it.
Every user has exactly one role, and a user cannot be created without one.
Learnient ships six roles that every account shares: Super Admin, System Admin, Admin, Manager, Instructor and Learner. They are templates rather than copies, so they cannot be renamed or deleted, and you build your own alongside them.
Super Admin and System Admin belong to Learnient rather than to you. They are how Learnient’s own staff support the product, they pass every permission check without consulting the role’s permissions, and they are never assignable inside your account.
A role cannot be deleted while people still hold it. You choose the role to move them to as part of deleting it.
Visibility
Section titled “Visibility”Visibility is a permission like any other, granted on the role. There are two:
| On screen | What it means |
|---|---|
| Organisation-wide user data access | Everybody in the account |
| Team-scoped user data access | Only the people who report to them |
Both labels say “organisation” where the rest of Learnient says account. They mean your whole account.
The important case is the third one, which has no label because it is the absence of both. Somebody with neither sees nobody, and that is deliberate: being allowed to open a screen never implies being allowed to see everyone on it.
So an empty users list is usually correct rather than broken. It is what a role with actions but no visibility looks like.
Granting Organisation-wide user data access asks you to confirm, because it is the one that turns a scoped administrator into an unscoped one.
Who counts as your team
Section titled “Who counts as your team”Team-scoped visibility follows the positions people hold, not a single manager field. If somebody manages a second job that a person holds, that person is on their team. When positions are switched on, everyone holding the position above a person counts as their manager for visibility, so three supervisors sharing one position all see the same team. See How positions work.
By default a manager sees the people who report to them directly and no further. Seeing the whole tree below them is a separate setting, switched on for the account first under Admin, People and Settings, and then chosen by each manager for themselves on their own profile. Switching it on for the account changes nobody’s view until the managers opt in.
One task can need more than one permission
Section titled “One task can need more than one permission”Permissions have been split finer over time, so a role that could once do a whole job may now hold only part of it. Importing a spreadsheet of users is its own permission, separate from creating users, and updating people from a spreadsheet is separate again.
When somebody reports that a button does nothing or a menu item is missing, compare their role against every permission the task touches rather than the obvious one.
Lenni actions need a role permission and organisation-wide visibility
Section titled “Lenni actions need a role permission and organisation-wide visibility”Asking Lenni to make changes, such as creating a group or assigning a course, needs the Lenni: Take actions permission on the role, and it also needs Organisation-wide user data access. Somebody with Team-scoped user data access can still ask Lenni questions about their team, but Lenni does not make changes for them yet. Each change also needs the same permission it needs on the screen, so Lenni: Take actions never lets anyone do more than their role already allows. See How Lenni actions work.