Training someone is easy. Training the right people, approved by the right manager, confirmed at the right level of the hierarchy — that’s where most HR teams quietly lose hours every week.
Today, we’re making that effortless. Smart Arena’s Direct Manager feature brings your organizational structure directly into your learning workflows, so training assignments, approvals, and certifications follow the chain of command automatically — without any manual handholding from HR.
How Direct Manager works
At its core, the feature lets you map your real organizational structure inside Smart Arena — up to 10 levels deep. Once you’ve assigned manager relationships (and you can bulk import them too), the platform uses that hierarchy automatically across your training workflows.
Three things become immediately more powerful:
- Enrollments that respect your org chart. When creating a training catalogue, you can set enrollment rights to “Direct Manager (Level 1)” — meaning each employee’s immediate supervisor can enroll their own team, without HR having to do it manually for everyone.
- Approvals at the right altitude. Need compliance sign-off at the department manager level, not just the team lead? Set your confirmers to Level 2 or Level 3. The system identifies the correct person for each learner, automatically.
- Statement signing tied to authority. Completion certificates and compliance statements can be routed to the manager at whichever hierarchy level actually carries the authority to sign them — whether that’s a team lead for routine training or a director for regulatory certifications.
Built for organizations that don’t fit a single chart
Real organizations are messier than org charts suggest. Emma might report to Mike day-to-day, but also to Lisa in HR for compliance matters. Direct Manager handles this with a priority system — you assign Mike as Priority 1 (primary manager) and Lisa as Priority 2 (secondary), and the platform knows who to notify first, who takes precedence in approval workflows, and how to group reporting.
What changes for your team
For HR Administrators: stop manually routing training assignments. Define the hierarchy once, and let Smart Arena do the matching.
For Managers: your team’s training activity surfaces to you automatically. You get visibility, enrollment rights, and signing authority without needing to chase HR for access.
For Employees: you always know who your manager is in the system, and your training approvals move faster because the right person is already in the loop.
How to use the new role
[USE CASE 1: Compliance Training at Scale]
Imagine you’re rolling out mandatory compliance training across 400 employees in five departments. You don’t want to manually assign each team’s training to their supervisor. And you definitely don’t want to chase down approvals one by one.
With Direct Manager, you open your training catalogue, go to Enrollers, select the Roles tab, and check Direct Manager. You set the level to 1 — meaning each employee’s immediate supervisor. Save.
Now, when this catalogue goes live, every team lead automatically gets enrollment rights for their own people. They can assign training directly, without an HR ticket. You’ve just saved yourself — and your managers — hours of back-and-forth.
[USE CASE 2: Multi-Level Approval Chain]
Now let’s talk about a more complex scenario. You’re running a certification program that requires sign-off at two different levels — the team lead enrolls, but a department director must confirm completion.
Here’s how you set that up. In the Enrollers section, you select Direct Manager at Level 1 — that’s the team lead. Then in the Confirmers section, you select Direct Manager at Level 3 — that’s the director, two steps up.
Smart Arena handles the rest. For each learner, it automatically identifies who their Level 1 and Level 3 managers are, based on the hierarchy you’ve defined. No manual routing. No risk of sending a confirmation request to the wrong person. The system knows your org chart — and uses it.
[USE CASE 3: Matrix Organizations — Handling Multiple Managers ]
Here’s where it gets really powerful for complex organizations. Emma works in operations, but she also has an HR manager for compliance purposes. She effectively has two managers.
You can assign both. Mike — her functional manager — gets Priority 1. Lisa from HR gets Priority 2. When a training notification goes out, Mike is contacted first. When compliance statements need signing, the system knows to escalate to the right authority based on the course settings.
Priority tells the system who matters most. Level tells it how high to go. Together, they reflect how your organization actually works — not just how it looks on paper.
How to set it up
Setting up Direct Manager takes a few minutes per user — or a few seconds per row if you use our bulk import. Navigate to Users → User Overview, open any user profile, go to the Direct Managers section, and assign. Then, when you next create a training catalogue or course, select “Direct Manager” as your enroller, confirmer, or statement signer and choose the hierarchy level that matches your approval chain.
The org chart you’ve always had in your head — it’s finally in your LMS.
