Connecting a manager to each participant is what lets the manager-side of a learning journey work — manager-facing activities, manager notifications, and the manager view of progress all depend on that connection existing. There are several ways to set it up, and most journeys use more than one.
Five ways managers get connected
Pick the path that matches how you're bringing participants in. You can mix them in the same journey.
Add managers by hand. On the People page, set each participant's manager when you add the participant. Best for small lists or one-off additions.
Import managers with participant data. Your Excel or CSV upload can include a manager email column alongside the participant email column. Knowly creates the manager entries automatically.
Collect the manager at signup, via the Online signup form. If participants sign up to the journey through a public link, the signup form has a Manager registration form step you can include and optionally make mandatory. See the section below for how this differs from the activity by the same name.
Collect the manager later, via a Manager registration form activity. Add the Manager registration form activity to the journey timeline. When the participant reaches it, they type their manager's name and email. See Manager registration form for what the activity looks like and what you can configure.
Auto-assign from a connected dynamic list. If you've connected a dynamic list whose directory data includes a manager email per person, Knowly assigns managers automatically as participants are added. See Auto-assign manager from a dynamic list.
The signup-form manager step vs. the activity
Two different features in Knowly share the name Manager registration form. They are not the same thing and they have separate settings.
The manager step in the Online signup form runs during signup, before the participant enters the journey itself. You configure it inside the Online signup form (or Teams signup form) editor, reachable from the People page or Settings. Two toggles live there:
Include manager registration step — whether the signup form asks for a manager at all.
Should manager registration be mandatory? — whether the participant can skip it during signup.
This step only runs for participants who sign up through the public link. Participants you add by hand or import never see it.
The Manager registration form activity runs inside the journey, as a scheduled activity in the timeline. You can make it blocking for the rest of the journey from Settings → Manager involvement → Require manager registration. That toggle is independent of the signup-form toggles — turning it off does not affect what the signup form does, and vice versa.
If you use both at once, the participant submits a manager at signup and then encounters the activity later in the journey too. Pick the path you actually need, or be intentional about asking twice.
Only one manager role per participant
Each participant has exactly one connected manager in Knowly. You can rename "manager" to "mentor", "coach", "sponsor", or anything else in journey Settings → Nomenclature, but the underlying role is still a single connection per participant.
If you need two genuinely separate support roles for the same participant — for example, a line manager and a mentor who should each see different things and receive different communications — the recommended approach is to run that as two learning journeys with the same participants, one designed for each role.
The reason for the workaround: manager-facing activities and notifications go to all managers on a journey. There's no way to scope an activity, notification, or visibility setting to a subset of managers within the same journey, so two roles in one journey would either share everything or nothing.
If the second person doesn't actually need to manage specific employees — they just want broad visibility into the journey to evaluate it, follow overall progress, or watch a pilot as a stakeholder or second-line manager — that's a team-guest situation, not a manager coupling. A view-only team guest can browse the learning journey and see its statistics without being anyone's manager, though they don't get the per-employee manager dashboard. See what a team guest can do and when to use one.
When managers get notified at registration
There are two parallel ways a manager can receive a notification tied to the moment of registration:
From the Manager registration form activity. When a participant submits the form (or its values arrive via the signup form), Knowly sends the registration notification configured on the activity to that manager.
From an "at registration" notification in an individual learning journey. If your individual journey has a manager-facing notification scheduled at the participant's registration, it fires when the participant enrolls.
If you set up both at the same time, the manager will receive both — Knowly doesn't deduplicate across these paths. Pick one, or be intentional about both.
For everything else managers receive while a journey is running — activity reminders, milestone updates, smart reminders — see What notifications does each activity type send?.
Before launch
Check that managers have the right email addresses and that any manager-facing activities and notifications are written for the audience you actually have. If you've renamed the role in Settings → Nomenclature, double-check that the custom term reads naturally in your manager-facing copy — Knowly uses the literal string you typed and won't translate it for participants using Knowly in a different UI language.
After launch
You can change a participant's manager later — see Changing or removing a manager mid-journey. If a manager email turns out to be wrong, see Fixing a manager's email address. The new manager may need context about what has already happened in the journey.