Important information for users of PICS Applicants

As part of our ongoing developments to applicant and learner management in PICS, we are making some behind-the-scenes changes to applicant data. These will be used further down the line to support future developments, including an improved onboarding process.

If you use the PICS Applicant Ident report field to identify your PICS applicants in other systems, please take note of the following:

In our upcoming software release on the 14th April, all existing applicants will have a new ident number added to their record. The old ident will still be available in the applicant record as the Original Applicant Ident. Both the original ident and the new Applicant GUID field will be available as report outputs in any reports that are based on the applicant report - in other words, any report whose title begins with 'applicant'.

The original ident field will be removed later in the year. In the meantime, we recommend that you use this overlap period to update any external reporting on applicants with the new idents. If you only use applicant data for reports within PICS, then you do not need to take any action.

The new applicant idents will be created in a consistent manner to help you match them to the original - for each original ident, the first digit will be replaced with a letter. Any idents starting with 0 will now begin with B, any starting with 1 will be replaced with C, and so on. For example, the original ident 00012 would become B0012, while the original ident 80794 would become J0794. 

This change will also impact those using the REST service for applicants - we will be in touch with these customers via email.

If you have any questions about these changes, don't hesitate to Get in Touch.