Question from a newbie

[scarps626]

Hello all,

To say my Access skills are weak would be an understatement. I'm trying to come up with the best way to build a database and I appreciate ANY help. Here is my situation:

I want to build a database for my company that will house information on employees' previous work experience and skills. For example, if I was looking for someone that previously worked at Company X, I could go to the database and search and find people that worked there.

My question: What is the best way to do this? What if there are multiple answers to a question (i.e. previous companies worked for)? How do I set that up? I realize how novice these questions are, but I haven't used Access in a long time. Any help is appreciated!

Thanks.

[CGM3]

The only suggestion that occurs to me is to have a "master" table that holds information about the employees -- name, ID, possibly address & phone number, etc. -- and a subsidiary table for previous work experience, each record for a previous job or position for the employee, with the key for this latter being in two parts, one being the employee ID and the other something like an ordinal number. For instance, for employee ID A1234, his latest work experience record could have a key of A1234 | 1, his next most recent could be A1234 | 2, and so forth.

Of course, you could just make the second part of the key an autonumber, then sort the records in queries and reports by the employee ID and whatever other fields seem appropriate: company name, last date worked, etc.

The formats of these records, of course, would depend on what data they need to contain.

[dcrake]

If you company has an job application form then use this as the bais of your database. Each prospective employee will fill in one of these forms (hopefully).

Page one will be about them (Parent record) Previous employment will be the repeating detail records (Child records). You should also create your forms to match the fields on the form starting top left to bottom right.

Someone will have to enter this data into your database, by following this design they will find it very easy to transfer from paper to database.

Look at the type of questions asked, are they dates? yes/no questions, explanations, etc. This will give you a guide as to the type of fields you need and the size of the fields.

David