Help pls! How does your company manage external compliance training in Docebo?

  • 12 August 2023
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treedy
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At our company, external compliance training is a big part of what we do.  In fact, it’s so important to us, that we’re currently using a second LMS called “SetSafety” to manage our health and safety training needs, which is an administrative burden and confusing for employees to be having to use two systems.  

This is why we’re asking for help!  We really want to have a single vendor solution with Docebo, but we haven’t been able to come up with a viable Docebo-only solution to date. What do you do for assigning and tracking external compliance training?  Is there a possible set up or solution we’re not seeing?  

Our Compliance Training Use Case 

We need to be able to:

  • Assign external training by Group or by User (external training examples: 3rd party classroom-based training such as Energy Safety Canada’s hands-on Fall Protection course or a WorkSafe BC First Aid Certificate) - we have approx. 60 of these courses that are mandatory or task/hazard-dependent for our employee’s role or project scope of work.  
  • Course completion needs to be associated with the certificate being uploaded and validated by a Power User 
    • Note, we have explored and do not want the user to upload the certificate as an “assignment” for an instructor to mark - for us, we see this as a convoluted workflow that does not allow for the certificate to be searchable afterwards - the certificate would then need to be uploaded again under External Training / Certificates (duplicating administrative work, and likelihood for records to not align due to lack of system controls). 
  • The external training certificates need to be able to be searchable and downloadable across the company by approx. half of our employees, will not all be Power Users.  We regularly need to search for and send employee external training certificates to our clients to verify our employee’s pre-access requirements for construction and oil and gas sites.    

What are we missing with Docebo capabilities?  

10 replies

jlreonal
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@treedy - We also tried the assignment as a solution, however, as you mentioned the instructors will need to mark it as complete and so we did not pursue this as an option. We created the same course certifications as an ILT; however, we cannot use our company’s certificate since customers require those certificates from our vendors. We recently enabled the External Training App so learners will be able to upload their certificates and managers and Power Users will have access to it too. We have ILT set-up and External Training, it is learner’s responsibility to upload their certificates after they obtain it outside the company.

M
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@treedy We’re doing something similar to @jlreonal. The upload function on the ILT courses is the only way we’ve found to have oversight and be able to pull the certificates for audits and whatnot. This is a great deal of work for supervisors to mark the course complete. It’s an ok work around, but not without its own challenges. 

 

pmo
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@treedy Can you expand on what you mean by “searchable”? Would a report suffice? 

 


The external training certificates need to be able to be searchable and downloadable across the company by approx. half of our employees, will not all be Power Users.  We regularly need to search for and send employee external training certificates to our clients to verify our employee’s pre-access requirements for construction and oil and gas sites.  

dklinger
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Can I suggest a step back?

You are looking to use Docebo as a system of record which should be doable once you host the learning and learning records in the system. It actually sounds like you are looking to support a gap measure instead of thinking about a cutover plan. Now there can be a thousand reasons you are doing it...and maybe a part of it is you are trying to leverage some layer of transparency from the system (reporting, manager visibility, etc).

Sorry if I am misinterpreting - but I would suggest an all or nothing strategy to avoid the burden of having many move records - which sounds error prone and asking for trouble. There is some value with having managers see the records of their staff all in one place - but then? I would suggest talking cutover manuevers (like we are going to close the course in A on such a date, make records avaliable in B on such a date, etc) and not gap manuevers.

The next best thing? You may want to see if the other learning system supports outbound APIs and automated reporting and look to transfer records to course shells in Docebo via some level of automation (would be my recommendation) to avoid what you are in the middle of right now.

Good luck with this. Disparate systems help no one.

treedy
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Thanks all for the replies so far - this screenshare / video should give a good visual description of our use case for compliance training https://somup.com/c0j2DIAQJy. - we would be willing to consider giving up some functionality, but the basic use case is:  

  • external training needs to be able to be assigned and tracked to completion (completion = verified upload of a valid certificate (e.g. first aid)
  • certificates need to be easily searchable and downloadable company-wide @pmo a report isn’t adequate for our business needs 
  • records integrity, ease of use, and administrative efficiency is key (for reference, we are currently tracking ~14,000 active mandatory compliance training records)   

@jlreonal and @megan.fralix thank you for this info re ILT - we haven’t deployed the ILT option in Docebo yet so I’m not familiar.  It would be SUPER helpful if you could show me a quick screenshare of what that workflow looks like in your world?  Many thanks for the help!! 

@dklinger, I’m not really sure I’m following what you mean by a cutover plan - if you could watch the video link posted above, I’m curious if you see a possible solution other than an LXP?  

D
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In a nutshell the reason you’re not able to connect Docebo with the Compliance Training site is there are no built in connectors of sorts between the two.

There are ways to work around this and each solutions comes with pro’s and cons….

Let’s start with the least expensive and move up the dollar chain from there…

Option  1:

You can reach out to the Compliance content provider and ask if they have they have the ability to provide either a “SCORM” (2004 3rd edition preferred or 1.2) or an AICC package for each of the courses which you use…  You would then create course in Docebo, mapping the appropriate SCORM or AICC package to the Docebo course.  

At this point you are functioning completely within Docebo and all the features of the Compliance site remain with the Compliance site, so you’ll have to leverage the functionality within Docebo to assign and track course progress.  As far as certificates of completion, those will need to be created and issued by Docebo well.

This will be a fair amount of work IF the content provider can/will provide you with the SCORM/AICC packages.

It’s likely the Docebo course completions will not be passed to the Compliance content provider unless the Compliance content provider can provide an AICC package or a “flavor” of SCORM that allows the Compliance content provides to host the content on their servers, but allow your users to content to their content from Docebo.  The beauty of this option IF available is the Compliance Content provide keeps control of their content by keeping it on their servers, it also typically allows them to update the content without you having to do anything..

 

Option 2:

In order to track the Compliance Course completions of these courses in Docebo, you will need to create a mirror of the Compliance training course in Docebo…  IF you want the Certificates of completion available in Docebo as well, you’ll have to create your Certificates in Docebo.

Next you’ll need to generate a regularly scheduled report from the Compliance Course provider that can be fed into Docebo via API’s.  This will allow you to pass the user’s course status grades, etc to Docebo, so that Docebo becomes your “System of Record” for all training.

It’s important to note that you will not likely be able to pass the certificates from the Compliance course to Docebo…  Here you’ll need to look at your “process...” You can create a certificate in Docebo and attach it to the Docebo course, and/or you can build a link to the Compliance content where the original certificate can be accessed.

In this options, your records in Docebo will not be updated “Real Time,” they will only be updated each time a report is generated and passed via API to Docebo…  Commonly this data is passed every hour or two.

 

Option 3:

You could add a Learning Records Store (LRS) that sits between Docebo and the Compliance Content.  Again you would build mirror courses in Docebo and manage your enrollments, tracking, etc. from Docebo.  Pretty much like Option 2…

Except here you would leverage “Webhooks” to link all three together…  So when a user is enrolled in a Docebo mirror course, the enrollment is passed to the LRS and to the Compliance Course…  When the user completes the Compliance Course, the completion information is passed to the LRS and Docebo.

This option is somewhat “Real Time” but you still have to deal with the “certificates” using one of the options I mentioned above.

This solution will likely come with licensing fees for the “webhooks” creation tool and the LRS may have costs associated with it as well.  

There are some benefits for this option as well.

Since the LRS serves as a “repository” for both the Compliance and Docebo course completions you may be able to leverage a BI Reporting tool attached to your LRS to provide enhanced reporting.

Another major advantage to this option is since the LRS retains the records from both Docebo and the Compliance content, should you ever decide to should you ever decide to expand your external to include and additional vendor, you can potentially build webhooks to connect the new content to the LRS.  

Along this same train of thought, should you decide to replace or discontinue use of any of the apps connected to your LRS, you won’t need to go through the headache or expense of moving / storing the Training History from the discontinued source since the records have already been stored in your LRS.

Before you get too excited about any of these solutions it’s important to point out there are a lot of factors that will influence which option or variation thereof that I haven’t addressed that could alleviate each an every one of these options I’ve presented.

If you want assistance exploring these options further, please let me know.

 

Hope this gives you some options to consider...

treedy
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Thanks for the detailed response @Dlibengood however, from what I’m seeing, these options don’t meet our business’ use case. 

Key issue: the compliance (external training) record MUST be the actual certificate issued by the 3rd party vendor, not a Docebo certificate template or a line item in a report.  The majority of the external content will never be available to us via SCORM or AICC.  

💁🏼 Anyone out there that works for major construction or oil and gas clients??  

To put it simply, for us, it’s about being able to systematically tell an employee (through one system) that based on their job title or branch location, they need to complete a series of internal and external courses.

  • The courses are assigned to the employee for completion.
  • Internal training is done within Docebo and shows complete when done. 
  • External training must be done outside of Docebo and is only shown as complete by uploading the proof of completion (the physical certificate issued by the 3rd party vendor). These certificates need to be easily retrievable through a search and download mechanism. 

We have dedicated BIT support resources coming on board for a Project kickoff in September, so we will have the opportunity to revisit our set up, but just hoping someone out there has a similar use case to us and could show us how they’ve handled the external training piece?  

 

J
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Not exactly sure if this would work for ILT learning, but if the external vendor can Consumer key and Shared secret information, would the LTI training material feature be a possible solution?

lrodman
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We have a page in courses that says “click here then click the new certificate button” and have users upload their own certs on the external training profile page. 
 

we also cleaned up that upload so it’s just cert name, date and file upload

lrodman
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It’s very inelegant. 

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