Create the ability to set a time-based restriction as to when a student can renew a certification

We have found, and been told by the Docebo Product Managers that there are many functions that don’t work well with eCommerce. We have run into similar issues with controlling Certifications and managing the payments. I will follow this to see if anyone has come up with a work around or has anything to upvote! Good luck to you.

Had some challenges and found some solutions to this, but I want to get a better understanding of what you are looking to do. If I am reading this your desired workflow is 

1. Student purchased a course
2. Completion of the course grants a certification. 
3. Recertification takes place via a different class
4. 30,60,45,90 days out from expiration the student receives an email.
5. Student returns to catalog and purchases recertification course
6. student takes recertification course
7. GOTO step 4 ( sorry apple basic moment)

Is that the workflow?

Assuming certifications and retraining is active in your platform?

Here is how I would do it

1. Student goes to course catalog and purchases course
2. Completion of curse grants certification
3. Completion of course also adds student to a new group
4. Recertification course is in a different catalog only visible to that group.
5. 30,60,45,90 days out from expiration the student receives an email with link to new catalog
6. Student goes to new catalog and purchases new class. 
7. Completion of new class renews certification. 

There are still a few gotchas in this.

Currently (to the best of my knowledge) there is no settings in the certification and retraining module that separate earning a certification from renewing a certification, so the student could take the first class again.  I know this is part of the Roadmap for the changes being made.

To prevent it you can try the following but test as I think I remember there were some less than perfect findings 

• You could archive the students enrollment in the first class which would effectively mean that they would need to either purchase the new class or repurchase the old class to earn the certification. I think this would convince most people not to purchase the old class again, but no guarantees. Also someone would need to manually archive the enrollments. so depending on the number of students, this could be a lot of work.  
• Another potential gotcha, (needs to be tested) is what happens if the click the renew button in their transcript. I am not sure where it takes them if there are multiple options. 
• If everyone earns the certification at the same time you could also alter the active dates of the first class so that after the date expires you can’t take it again. This can work if your certification course is different from period to period. 

We struggled with this too especially the recertification from a different source bit ( we weren’t charging, but same issue) and finally went to badges until the new split between certify/re-certify is added. That worked for us as the certifications are yearly. So we issued a new badge each year. Reportable and trackable, but less than optimal. 

If you go this route the same group info from above would give you the ability to separate badge earning and have a paywall. 

Hope this helps and I look forward to what others have to say. 

The piece I would love to see is another status that shows “needs to certify’/”needs to re-certify.” I want new hires to be placed in the “Need to certify” status, so they show up in reporting as need to take it, but placing them with a certification assumes they already took it, even if it’s expired. 

We currently have some automations set up that automatically update the certification to the correct renewal date no matter how they enroll (they only get assigned the certification if they select “renew” in the certifications section of their activities). For now, we are relying on course enrollment on hire to get the users started, but that makes it hard to validate who should have the certification without combining data from multiple places. Would love to see more love to the certifications.

​@hailey.gebhart Agreed. especially with mandatory or compliance training. We auto-enrolled those learners on first login and track enrollment status to see if they achieved the certification, and then tracked the certification status as separate things.