Personal grades can be created for individual employees, to override the grade associated with their post. Grade usage levels let you control the use of employee personal grades. That is, they let you specify whether or not a personal grade can be created or changed for a post-holder. Personal grades are created initially via Employee Grade History. They can then be maintained via Employee Grade History or Employee Spinal Grade History.

Default grade usage levels for both post grades and employee personal grades are set via System Grade Usage Levels. When you create a new post or employee, the system automatically applies the system default grade usage levels. If necessary, you can override these settings for individual posts and employees using Post Detail and Employee Grade Usage Preference.

To decide whether or not to allow the maintenance of a personal grade, the system compares the personal grade usage level with the post grade usage level. If the combination prohibits grade creation, users may be prevented from accessing these windows. The usage levels also determine how the window is used if no post grade is present.

Usage Level Table shows all the possible usage level combinations and lists the effects of different combinations on the use of personal and post grades.

Note: Before the grade usage level facility was introduced, the system operated as if the usage level of all post grades was zero, and of all personal grades was 4.

When you first upgrade to a version of ResourceLink that has the grade usage level facility, the system sets these same values: