How does training audience targeting and course targeting work?

The Training Audience Targeting option on courses and training plans will limit access to the course or training plan home page and content. If the global targeting option in course catalogs—Course Targeting—is enabled in the Global Settings, the Training Audience Targeting option will also control which courses and training plans are displayed to which users in a catalog. 

In this article, we'll explain the two targeting options and how they affect each other.

In this article

• The Training Audience Targeting option
• The Course Targeting option
• Overview of combinations of targeting settings

The Training Audience Targeting option

Training Audience Targeting allows you to target courses and training plans to certain users and/or groups.

Once individual users, Microsoft Entra (Azure Active Directory) groups, or Microsoft 365 groups are specified in the Target Audience field of a course or training plan, you'll limit access to the training in question.

In this case, the users and/or groups added in the Target Audience field will have access to the course or training plan in question. The admins of the training, session instructors (for instructor-led training), enrolled users, and course and catalog admins will also have access to this training. Other users won't have access to this training.

If no users are added to the Target Audience field of a course or training plan, every user who has access to the catalog of the course or training plan will have access to the training.

Find information about the configuration options for the Training Audience Targeting option for courses here, and training plans here.

The Course Targeting option

The global targeting option in your Learn365 tenant—Course Targeting—controls whether Training Audience Targeting affects the display of courses and training plans in course catalogs.

By default, the Course Targeting option is disabled in Global Settings, which means that all users with access to a catalog will see all of its courses and training plans, regardless of the Training Audience Targeting settings of the respective courses and training plans.

If the Course Targeting option is enabled globally, it activates the rules for Training Audience Targeting at training level. This means that only users specified in the Target Audience of a course or training plan, as well as users who are enrolled in the training, session instructors, and catalog and course admins, will be able to see this training on the course catalog page.

Combinations of targeting settings