I use annually renewing certificates for mandatory annual training.

It does require some education as to the course completion not meaning as much as the certificate status, but that’s doable. The biggest stumbling block is getting people to correctly renew them.

We faced much the same challenge, and we had to go the route of duplicate courses for each annual cycle. That was before Docebo had released their archived enrollment options, however. Given what I’m aware of technologically, I think that either the archived enrollments option or the annual course versions method are likely to be your best bets. Happy to talk through more details offline if needed!

Hi @SarahV2008, 

Welcome to the Docebo community. 

The renewal process is currently being scoped for update. Saying that, they’ve been promising improvements to this for a long time and I don’t think it will be anytime this year. 

In the meantime they have introduced something that makes it slightly easier. You can Archive an enrolment and re-enrol to the same course. Unfortunately this is not automated but it allows users to use the same course to refresh their certification. 

You can do this in bulk from the course > enrollment tab. 

Aimee

For any courses where we need users to be able to go through the same course again (such as an annual requirement), we use the Archive Enrollments option.  You can archive their enrollments in the course and there’s an option in that process to Re-Enroll them or not, as well as reset their tracking on training materials or not.  This maintains their previous completion information - you just have to choose whether to view current enrollments or archived enrollments when viewing the enrollment stats.

I will say that the downfall we have with archiving is that valuable reporting information is no longer available once this is done for a course and user. i.e. if you need to reference old test question responses, etc. This is not information you can gather once that enrollment has been archived. So keep that in mind. Therefore some of our teams archive without issues and some duplicate and rename the course so that can accurately report on the old course data. Hope this makes sense.

Leverage the Learning Plan option. This has options of certification and recertification

Managing the Certifications and retraining app – Docebo Help & Support

@SarahV2008 - I feel your pain! While it’s not 100% reliable, I have been using the Certifications & Retraining feature. By creating a certification for your course(s), you can set it up so the certification will expire and require users to renew (retake) the training every 365 days. You can also view how many days till each user must renew, but looking at the Awarded To list in Certifications & Retraining. Make sure you also update the Certifications & Retraining field under Advanced Settings of the Course properties. You can then use the notification trigger ‘Certification has expired’ and notify users of the upcoming expiration by selecting notify 30 days Before the Event. What I learned (the hard way) is that the expiration notification is triggered first, but then the user has to actually log into the LMS before the enrollment event occurs, so until they log into the platform, they aren’t technically re-enrolled in the course again. Somewhere around the point when re-enrollment occurs, the course record is automatically ‘archived’ so you can still see past completion dates (use the Reports tab in the Course Management screen and select Archived Enrollments to view previous records). Although it ‘works’ it can be a little buggy, so I’m really hoping they will update this feature to make it more reliable and easier to use. In the meantime, it’s really your best option. Best wishes to you!

Archiving is probably your best bet even in its current state…

• look for updates to the Certification and Retraining app (hopefully soon)

you can review some of the requested updates or visit the new roadmap...some of the posts have been closed...Still getting to know the new roadmap layout...

We also feel your pain and have to duplicate courses. Archiving and Certifications do not work for our use case. We are waiting for Docebo to resolve this common LMS feature.

Leveraging archiving for certification and retraining is highly effective. When a user clicks the “renew” button on their certification, their course enrollment is archived, and they are re-enrolled. This places them in the “renewing” state. Upon completing the course again, a new certification is issued. Ensure that any notifications reminding users to complete their certification or training link directly to the certification, prompting them to click the renew button.

Note: If you archive the course and the user retakes it without clicking the “renew” button, the certification will not be re-issued.

We are working on moving away from the Certifications functionality because our users are confused by the interface and the notification.

Many users will see the course listed on the Certifications tab and miss the renewal date (it’s tiny), so will click the RENEW button long before they need to renew. 

Other users will receive the notification (we send it 30 days before the certification is set to expire), begin the course, and if they can’t finish it in one sitting, they often return to the notification to try and get back to the course. So the link they click is the RENEW button, and they end up archiving their progress and starting over. If this is for a 2 hour Preventing Workplace Harassment course that they were 90 minutes through, we have very unhappy users. 

Where we can we are using an annual renewal period, and we create a new version of the course for the annual campaign. We also use a separate version of the course for new hires, which enables us to track to 100% completion without constantly having new assignees to confuse the numbers.

Hope this helps!

am with you @JGildea ...it’s just too basic right now...I heard rumblings that we could potentially have a new certification widget that would help a lot...most of our users miss the RENEW button and that causes more trouble than it’s worth + if you don't want your users to do the same course as the previous certification, there is no easy way to do this. If you set it up with 2 courses at the start, users will be required to complete both to get certified...slo you have to wait and add the “renewal” course AFTER everyone has gone through the first cycle...very counter intuitive...

Hi

When using Archive enrolments, we have used this for our annual mandatory learning.  We archived enrolments, updated the training material (if required) then enrolled the branch that we needed to complete the learning.

We don’t use the automatic Archive & Enrol option as some of those who were enrolled have let the business.

Also we found out for reporting purposes, when you archive users, the report don’t show any “additional fields” that you may have created for the users.

This caused a problem for us as we report over a long period of time to allow us to compare this time last year to this year, or previous years for our numbers etc.  Therefore it impacts our PowerBi reports, we haven’t use the function since.

@Winnie Cairney also note that if the course you are archiving had a test or a survey as part of the learning objects, that data cannot be retrieved at this time...another big reason we don't use it

Yeah. I was surprised by this as well. I assumed a modern LMS would have this functionality without the archive workaround or manual processes. I have yet to see anything done when we’re told that Docebo is working on it … their feature release cycle is extremely long. I don’t think they’re working on any new features at all, just maintenance of current code. We have certification exams that expire after two years but luckily we create new versions each year anyway, so it’s not been that big of a problem (we end up creating new courses). We expire their certificate and the new course/exam renews the certificate and badge. But if you need this functionality I’d start looking into other LMS solutions because Docebo does not create new features. I think the current feature set is all there is and there isn’t a plan for updates or additional features or functionality. 

This is a badly needed….. I won’t even say upgrade. Rather it’s a badly needed basic feature. 

There are so many gotchas to this subject.

There really are two schools of thought surrounding this and slippery slopes for both.

Once the product gets automated archiving right for WBTs, the two schools will delineate themselves:

• annual based on windows of time and reupping learning objects
• annual based on a roaming time / date (once a year after joining an organization for example) and the reuse of learning objects

IMHO - Consultant companies are going to make a lot off of this. Because this gets twisted no matter what platform you are on (once the implementation of certification fits for many). We are going to need to understand our audit/risk levels and what are the requirements associated with them to get it right.