Scenario
As an admin or site owner, you want to automate content assignment — for example, assigning an onboarding track to every new engineer, or a quarterly compliance course to everyone in a regulated department.
Solution
Make sure a People Segment exists for the people the content should be assigned to.
For more on segments, see How to use dashboard segments.Create a new automated rule with Assign a content item as the action.
For the full procedure, see How to create an automated rule. The action's fields appear below the Action dropdown.
[IMAGE: ASSIGN A CONTENT ITEM ACTION PANEL]Configure the action's fields:
Content Item — the content to assign.
Assigner — the user who appears as the assigner. The assigner shows up in PlusPlus and in the invitation email for the assignment.
Time to Complete — how long people have to complete the content after the rule assigns it. The default, Inherit from Content Item Settings, uses the time-to-complete configured on the content item itself.
Click Publish.
The rule runs on its scheduled cadence, evaluating the segment and assigning the content to anyone who matches and does not already have an active assignment. See How the rule handles existing assignments in the Go deeper section.
Go deeper
What content types you can assign
The Assign a content item action supports the following content types:
Tracks
Articles
Videos
Courses
Guides
Event series
Assigning compared to enrolling
When the content item is an event series, this action assigns the series — it does not enroll the person into a specific event of that series. People still need to enroll themselves into a scheduled event, or be enrolled by a separate rule.
A common pattern is to pair two rules: one that assigns the parent track or event series, and a second that enrolls people into the upcoming events. For enrollment rules, see How to automate event enrollments and How to automate scheduled track enrollments.
How the rule handles existing assignments
The rule checks for an existing assignment to the content before assigning it. The behavior depends on the current state of any existing assignment:
Outstanding (not started or in progress) — no new assignment.
Dropped — no new assignment.
Complete — no new assignment.
Exempted — no new assignment.
Expired — a new assignment is created.
The expired-assignment behavior is the mechanism for recertification. If the content has an expiration period, an assignment that reaches its expiration date is no longer counted as "existing" by the rule, so the next run re-assigns the content to the same person. To configure how long an assignment stays valid before expiring, see How to set expiration dates for content.
Time to Complete
The Time to Complete field controls how long people have to complete the content after the rule assigns it:
Inherit from Content Item Settings — the assignment uses the time-to-complete configured on the content item itself. This is the default.
Custom Duration — overrides the content's default. Selecting this option reveals a numeric input for the number of days within which the content must be completed.
A custom duration on the rule only applies to assignments created by this rule. Other assignments to the same content — manual assignments, or assignments from other rules — keep their own time-to-complete settings.