Skip to main content
Contact Support

Managing teams via CSV

Tags:

You can create and edit nested teams using drag and drop right in the Skills platform. See Managing teams to learn how.

However, if you’re managing large organizations with dozens of teams, you can use a CSV upload to simplify the process and reduce human error.

Who can use this?

  Stnd Prem Strt Pro Ent
Learners:          
Managers:     (✓) (✓) (✓)
Admins:     ✓ ✓ ✓
(✓) May be available depending 
on your permission settings.
Learn more about Skills legacy plans, 
updated plans, and roles.
 

Tip: See also APIs and integrations to learn how to leverage APIs to manage your teams.

Creating new teams

Whether you’re just starting to set up teams in Skills or wanting to add new teams to your existing team structure, you can download a CSV template to create them.

  1. Open this template in a spreadsheet program and save a copy of it.
  2. Do not reorder or alter the column names in the header row.
  3. Populate the following columns of the spreadsheet for each team, using one row per team:
    • ID: Leave this blank when creating new teams.
    • TeamName: Enter the name for your team. This must be a unique name and cannot already exist in your plan.
    • ParentTeamName: If this is a child (nested) team, enter the name of the parent. Otherwise, leave it blank.
    • Remove: Leave this blank when creating new teams.
  4. Follow the instructions below to import your completed CSV.

Tips

  • Team names must be between 2 and 200 characters. Team names can include unicode special characters.
  • If a parent team doesn't already exist, you must add it as a unique row. You can create new parent and child teams during the same upload. However, parent teams must appear first in the CSV. For example, if Team A is a parent of Team B, you can add Team A to row 2, and Team B to row 3—but not the other way around.
  • Since the names of parent teams must be entered exactly as they already exist—or as you’re now creating them—consider using copy/paste to avoid misspellings.
  • Limit your CSV to 1,000 rows for a successful upload. If you need to add more than 1,000 rows, upload multiple CSVs.

Use case

Need to bulk add a large number of learners to a channel? Use the steps above to create a team. Then add the team to the channel. Any learner joining or leaving the team in the future is automatically reflected in the channel membership.

back to top

Editing or removing existing teams

If you already have a team structure set up in Skills, you can download a CSV of your current structure, make your edits, and then upload your edited CSV.

  1. On the Teams tab of the People page (opens in new tab), click the Download teams icon.
  1. Save the CSV file as a backup in case you need to revert to the original state. We recommend adding “original” and a date/time stamp to the filename for easy identification.
  2. Make a copy of the file with a unique filename. This is the copy you’ll use to make your edits and, eventually, import back into Skills.
  3. See the respective instructions below to edit teams or remove teams.
  4. When finished, follow the instructions below to import your completed CSV.

Tip: When importing, Skills will only update teams (rows) that have been modified from the CSV you downloaded. It will ignore cells with no changes, and will also ignore rows that you remove entirely. To help reduce human error, we recommend deleting any rows that you do not wish to modify to ensure that Skills will ignore them.

Editing teams

  • Do not alter or reorder the column names.
  • Do not alter the value in the ID column. This is a system-generated field used to uniquely identify a team.
  • You can change the team’s name by editing the TeamName column. Otherwise, leave it unchanged.
  • You can add or change a team’s parent by editing the ParentTeamName column. Otherwise, leave it unchanged.

Removing teams

  • Do not alter or reorder the column names.
  • Do not alter the value in the ID column. This is a system-generated field used to uniquely identify a team.
  • Enter “Remove” in the Remove column for any teams you wish to delete.

Note: The following will happen when you remove a team:

  • If the removed team has any child teams, the child teams will remain intact—along with all their assigned learners—and will move up one level in the team structure.
  • If the removed team has any learners directly assigned to it, they will become unassigned learners—unless they’re still assigned to one or more other teams. This means they’ll remain on the plan and their Pluralsight account will remain unchanged—they just won’t be assigned to a team. You can either move them to a different team before you remove the team, or find them in the Unassigned tab of the People page afterwards.

back to top

Importing your CSV

Whether adding, editing, or removing teams, you must upload your CSV when you’re done with your edits.

  1. After editing your CSV file, save your changes and close it.
  2. On the Teams tab of the People page (opens in new tab), click Import CSV.
  3. Click Choose file and navigate to and select your CSV file.
  4. Click Upload to import your file.

See the next section to learn how to confirm your upload.

back to top

Confirming your upload

When you upload your CSV, Skills will automatically download a confirmation CSV showing you the results of the upload. Check the Message column of the confirmation CSV to make sure the changes to each row were successful.

If the Message column contains “Success”, the respective row was updated successfully.

Any other value in this column indicates a failure for that row. An error in any column will result in failure for the entire row—no partial changes will be made.

Common issues that may generate an error

Adding a team

  • Name must contain at least two characters. See Creating new teams above for guidelines on team names.
  • Team already exists. Duplicates cannot exist within a plan at any level of the nested teams hierarchy.

Assigning a parent team

  • Cannot create a circular relationship. A parent team cannot have one of its child teams as its parent.
  • Parent team not found. Either the parent team was deleted in a previous upload, was misspelled, or doesn't exist.

Removing a team

  • Please include ID. In order to remove a team, you must include its ID in the ID field.
  • Team not found. Either an incorrect ID was entered in the ID field, or an ID was deleted from a previous upload.

Related articles