Managers and External Users

I have some courses that I want to make available to External Users by permission only.

Now - some additional context.

The External Users enroll to a profile via their provided link.

This profile was created with a "Manager Email" (mine). This does not appear to be the same as the role 'Manager'

The courses I want to make available to them are set to "Manager Approved".

The Problem

I had a test user try to enroll and the "Enroll Button" changed to say "Pending" - good so far...

I never got an email and I am not sure that anyone did.

I am unable to find anywhere in Prime that the request was even made

I cannot seem to assign a manager to the users because it is greyed out. (see below)

So at this point, I cannot figure out how to get the external test user enrolled in the course.

Sadly - as an admin, I was also unable to simply add the user to the course. UGH!

So - not only does the request never come but I cannot seem to add them if I wanted.

In these cases - self-enroll is not an option. They need to know it is there but they need permission to get in.
Really frustrated at the moment with user management. I don't really care about internal vs external - they are all simply users to me.

The problem is that I could use features of both types that are not available to both types.

Any ideas out there? Let me know if I need to explain further.
Thanks.