An intermediate course in federal recordkeeping obligations, written for the employee who covered records awareness during onboarding and now has to work with the rules rather than simply know they exist. It follows the full chain: what makes something a federal record rather than a convenience copy or personal paper, the lifecycle from creation through disposition, retention and disposition scheduling including how General Records Schedules operate, and electronic records management in an all-electronic environment. Retention gets the most time, and deservedly — why an unscheduled record cannot lawfully be destroyed, how disposition eligibility follows from event-driven as against time-driven triggers, and how a litigation hold or a pending FOIA request suspends normal disposition regardless of what the schedule says.
Electronic records, and chat in particular, is where this course earns its place. Records training still tends to assume paper and email. Here email is treated as a record like any other, and the same logic extends to chat and collaboration platforms — where the casual feel of a message leads people to assume it cannot be a record, even though a policy decision reached in a group chat can be precisely that. The course covers metadata, electronic recordkeeping systems described generically rather than by product, and the habits that keep records retrievable when someone changes role or departs. Running through it is a legal weight ordinary records training does not carry: unauthorized or accidental destruction has real consequences and triggers a duty to report. Every module carries an interactive activity and a knowledge check, and a branching capstone follows one workday from drafting a memo, through discussing it in chat and emailing a final version, to the end of its retention period.
