When a staff member leaves your organisation or transfers to a different role or tenancy, their Acorn account should be managed carefully to preserve their training history while removing or adjusting their access.
When a staff member leaves
Step 1: Suspend the account
Suspending an account prevents the user from logging in while retaining all their training data and completion history. This is preferable to deleting the account.
- Go to Admin > User Management > Browse and Update Users and search for the user.
- Click the lock under Suspended.
See How to Suspend and Un-suspend a User for detailed steps.
Step 2: If using a HR feed
If your tenancy uses an HR feed, the account will be automatically suspended when the user is marked as departed in your HR system and the next sync runs. You do not need to manually suspend the account in this case — but you may want to do so immediately if access needs to be revoked before the next sync. See HRIS Integration FAQs.
Step 3: Reassign any supervisor relationships
If the departing user was a supervisor, their direct reports will need to be reassigned to a new supervisor. Update the manager_username field for affected users via a Bulk User Upload. See How to Bulk Upload Users.
When a staff member transfers internally and their role changes
- Update their Job Title, Department, and Cohort memberships to reflect the new role.
- If their email address changes, update it in Acorn before the HR feed sync to avoid a duplicate account being created. See How to Browse and Update Users.
- Review their enrolments — they may need to be unenrolled from role-specific courses and enrolled in new ones.
Can I delete a user account instead?
Acorn does not recommend self-service deletion of user accounts. Suspending the account is the recommended approach as it preserves training records for compliance and reporting purposes.