Learning Plans that Include Courses with Multiple Refresher Requirements and Certifications

Hi ​@diane5542 ,

This is one of the most common architectural questions coming up with the redesigned Learning Plans and Certifications experience, because it changes how courses, learning plans, and certifications relate to one another.

To answer your two core questions directly:

1. Can a single Learning Plan contain courses with different renewal requirements? Not within a single new Learning Plan or Certification. In the redesigned framework (Creating and managing learning plans and certifications), Learning Plans and Certifications are sibling "learning program" types managed under Content and delivery > Learning plans and certifications:

• Learning Plans are sequences of courses with no expiration.

• Certifications are learning programs where the expiration and renewal rules live at the program level (Properties > Recertification), not at the individual course level. When a learner clicks Renew now on a Certification, Docebo archives their current Certification enrollment and resets progress across all courses inside that Certification (Renewing certifications).

• While you can still attach Legacy Certifications (Content and delivery > Legacy certifications) to individual courses inside a standard Learning Plan during the coexistence period, a course assigned to a new Certification cannot use a Legacy Certification (Managing legacy certifications). For any new build, designing around the new Certification learning programs will save you a painful migration later.

2. Should you group courses into 4 term-based Certifications (1-Year, 2-Year, 3-Year, Calendar-Year) or keep topic-specific Certifications? You should keep topic-specific Certifications (or only bundle courses that are always assigned together to the exact same audience at the exact same time). Trying to use four generic "term-based" certifications across your catalog creates a major tracking issue in both the old and new models:

• Why generic term-based Certifications break in Legacy Certifications: If you assign multiple courses to a single Legacy Certification, Docebo treats them as an OR condition—completing any single course awards the certification for all of them (Managing legacy certifications).

• Why generic term-based Certifications break in New Certifications: In the new experience, a Certification requires learners to complete all mandatory courses inside it before the certification is issued, and renewing it resets every course in that bundle at once. If a 1-year Certification contains five different topic courses, a learner who only needs two of them for their qualification—or who completed them six months apart—would be forced to complete and renew all five on a single shared timer.

Recommended Architecture in the New Framework Because the new model treats Learning Plans and Certifications as parallel building blocks, the cleanest way to structure multi-tiered qualification requirements is to split your qualification into modular programs and let Groups + Enrollment Rules bundle them for the learner:

1. One-Time Completion Courses → Standard Learning Plan: Put all foundational courses that never expire into a qualification Learning Plan (e.g., "[Area] – Core Qualification"). Learners complete this once and retain permanent completion.

2. 1-, 2-, and 3-Year Completion-Based Courses → Topic-Specific New Certifications: Create a Certification learning program (Content and delivery > Learning plans and certifications > New/Assign > Certification) for each recurring topic (even if it only contains a single course). Under Properties > Recertification > Certification expiration, select Calculated from the issue date and set it to 365, 730, or 1095 days, along with your preferred Renewal policy window (Managing certifications).

3. Calendar-Year Expiration Courses → Fixed-Date New Certification(s): One of the biggest wins in the new Certifications experience is native calendar-year expiration without workarounds. Under Properties > Recertification > Certification expiration, you now have two clean options (Managing certifications):

   • Fixed date: Enter 12-31 (MM-DD), which expires the certification automatically at the end of December 31st regardless of when the learner completed it.

   • Calculated from the issue date + Extend the expiration to the end of the Year: Useful if you want a learner who completes a course late in the year to carry their validity through the end of the following calendar year.(Note: If everyone in that qualification area must take the exact same set of calendar-year refresher courses every December, you actually can bundle those specific annual courses into a single "[Area] – Annual Calendar Refresher" Certification since they share the exact same 12-31 deadline and audience.)

4. Automate the Bundle via Enrollment Rules: Instead of nesting everything inside one Learning Plan, assign learners to an automatic Group for that qualification area and use a single Enrollment Rule to enroll them simultaneously into the Core Learning Plan and the required Topic Certifications. You can also place them together in a dedicated Channel or Catalog so learners see their entire qualification path in one place.