Your summary mentioned that the Employee Master table includes only the primary position while the emp_positions table has every position the employee holds, if I understood correctly.

A possible way to keep your primary position out of the secondary position column would be to exclude the position listed in the Employee Master table from the possible choices for that other column.

E.g., if Joe is Director (primary position) and honorary barista, he'd have Director in Employee Master but Director and honorary barista in Emp_positions.

Your primary position column would thus select only the role from the Employee Master table, and non-primary (secondary) will be any of Joe's other positions from emp_positions that do not match the one in Employee Master.

Sorry I can't think of a tidy way to handle multiple non-primary roles though.

Becky