You can add someone to a learning journey after it's launched. The main thing to decide is whether they catch up on everything the group has already received or only pick up what's still ahead. It's straightforward in a cohort journey and more involved in an individual one, so the two are covered separately below.
Cohort journeys
When you add a participant from the People tab of a cohort journey, Knowly asks how much of the journey they should get:
Invite to all activities gives them access to every activity that's already been sent, and lets you send an optional catch-up notification.
Only invite to future activities skips everything sent so far — they won't see those past activities and won't be notified about them, but they'll receive the rest of the journey as usual. (When you add people from an import, the same option is called Only invite to remaining activities.)
Choose Only invite to future activities when the person has already done the earlier material somewhere else — for example, when you're moving a group that already finished its prep in another journey and you don't want that prep sent again. This choice is specific to cohort journeys; individual journeys don't have it.
Individual journeys
Individual journeys don't have the cohort "future activities" choice, so this takes a bit more care. Each participant's schedule is built around their own anchor date, so there's no shared "past" to opt out of. Review the generated timeline before you finish — it shows exactly what the person will receive and when.
If you're adding someone who should be able to open an activity but not get notified about it, set that activity's scheduling to Available from start before you add them. Activities scheduled that way show up right away and don't send an invitation. It's a workaround rather than a dedicated setting — it changes how the activity is scheduled for the journey — so set it deliberately and switch it back once the person is in.
Don't delete activities to control what people receive
Deleting an activity is not the way to control what a newly added group gets, and it's more destructive than it looks. It removes the activity for everyone on the journey — including people who already received and completed it, who then lose access to it — and the engagement and results collected for it are gone for good. Knowly warns that Deletion can't be undone.
It's true that a notification already sent to someone's inbox isn't recalled, but that's the only part deletion leaves alone — the activity and everything in it disappears from every participant's journey. Use the invite options above instead: they control what new participants receive without touching anyone else's experience.
Communicate the context
However someone joins late, a short message explaining where they're entering the journey and what to do first goes a long way.