I found that if you add the renewal course after the initial set-up and award to the user, when they go to renew, since they cannot complete the same course for certifications, they only have the option to launch the next available course. The renew button takes them to a list of courses tied to the certification and allow them to choose which one to complete. That said, when you have more than 2 courses, and a user is starting their process for the first time, it may be necessary to instruct them on which course to take first. Not sure if this is what you need...

@lrnlab I didn’t know they get to choose if there are mutiple paths to the certification. I did learn that if we award the training manually, they do not get a “renew” button. Back to testing. 

Well since they cannot complete the same course for certification, the idea would be to add 1 course for each retraining cycle...So for the 1st year, they complete course 1,, then in the 2nd year, to get the cert they would need to completed 2 courses but since 1 is already done, that’s the only choice they have to make...and so on...does that help?

Intersesting but what happens in year 3? They need to repeat the renewal courses they did in year 2 every year. Plus, new people are starting all the time so they have to start at course1. 

The path is

Complete course 1 to earn the certification.

Complete course 2 to renew the certification (annually from the time they completed it). 
Cousre 2 is perfect for renewals with the way certifications and retraining work. I’m struggling with how to award the first certification in an automated process. Right now, we are manually (single or csv upload) awarding the certification and tying it to Course 2 for renewals.  

@dianex.gomez What if you setup a course equivalent for that original course? According to a Docebo rep, the user’s certification would be renewed… I have not tried it yet though but am looking into testing this.

we managed something similar with groups and enrolment rules + equivalencies...quite a complicated set-up but it works well...not bullet proof but good. We also use archiving as part of the process since there are 2 courses required to be certified and 1 is an ILT. 

The challenge we had with equivalencies is transaction date. If the user completes a course on Nov 1 and is enrolled in the equivalent course on Jan 1, the completion for the equivalent course will be Jan 1. They would have to be enrolled in both courses from the start. Or as @lrnlab says, using enrollment rules, when completing course 1, automatically enroll in the renewal course with an equivalency. 

New challenge is reporting on who actually completed which courses. Using equivalencies artificially inflates the renewal course numbers. Might be worth it to automate the process. 

@lrnlab could you please elaborate on your groups and enrolment rules + equivalencies setup.

We were directed to go in this direction during our onboarding and have structured our entire certification and recertification process around this. As we were about to launch the recert courses we discovered that the equivalencies don’t work because the target recert course always completes immediately due to the source course beng completed. Docebo support tell us this is expected behaviour.

• customer completes course A (has no certification associated)
• enrollment rule enrolls user in recertification course B (has certification associated)
• recertification course B is an equivalency target of course A (without this the user is only enrolled in recertification course B, not completed)
• user now has certification and can renew by selecting recertification course B (certification has ‘Allow users to retake the same course’ enabled)

but… as soon as the user skips to the second course content file or exits the course it checks the source course status (I don’t know why this doesn’t happen earlier) and the recert course is automatically marked as completed, and the cert is renewed. The user is recertified by literally opening and closing the course without completing any content.

Docebo say this is expected because the target course is marked as completed any time that the that status of the source course is completed, not just at the time the source course is originally completed. Given this, I can’t find a way to make it work, so I’m really eager to know how you did.

one final note: I have looked at disabling ‘Allow users to retake the same course’ and doing a new recertification course each year, but we have multiple regional courses which all earn the same cert and will all use the same recert course, so when the user renews they won’t just see the recert course, but all the other regional courses as well, meaning as far as I can find we don’t have a recertification option.

@gus not sure I can explain it all in this post but here we go…

• In our case, users need to complete 1 of 2 e-learning courses + 1 ILT each cycle.
• The e-learning courses are duplicated for each cycle (not re-used nor archived)
• The ILT courses completion are archived each quarter (to allow users to rebook themselves in another session), so not duplicated
• Once the completed 1 of the 2 e-learning + 1 ILT, they are added to a group that then assigns them a 3rd course (not published, not in catalogues, etc.) that represents the completion of the “cycle”
• this 3rd course is marked as completed by way of an equivalent to the any of the 2 e-learning courses.
• Once the 3rd course is assigned and automatically marked as Completed, it then assigns the Certification.
• Each certification is only good for 1 year and we do not re-use these. We have a Certification for each cycle (like the e-learning courses). Users are not allowed to renew them; they must earn a new one for the next cycle
• Only the ILT courses (we have almost 200) are re-used

Hope this makes some sense…

To manage this process, and due to the limit on the number of sets and rules we can have in a group, we have to manage 30 groups for each cycle (this gets more and m ore complicated as time goes on as we need to keep building groups as we add more cycles) + their corresponding enrolment rules.

Our main challenge was with the ILT courses as we have thousands of sessions each year across hundred of locations so trying to manage it all in a single ILT courses was just impossible.

I may have missed some of the finer details but hopefully you get the idea...let me know if you have any other questions.

@gus I had the same problem with equivalencies. Once the user interacts with the course, the equivalency kicks in. I have discovered that you can have two paths to certification, with some risk. Let’s call them initial and renewal, which can be courses, learning plans, or one of each. 

1. When user completes the Initial course, they are automatically enrolled in the Renewal course via enrollment rule, but would not be marked it complete, no equivalency. 
2. Both courses are associated with the certification. 

3. When users select "renew" they see both courses because they are enrolled in both. 

4. This is where it gets dicey, the user must choose wisely. Expecting all users to choose correctly is a risk. 

5. If they choose renewal course, their enrollment will be archived. Then when they complete the renewal course, they recertify, and all works as expected. 

6. If the user chooses the initial course, their enrollment will be archived, and it is as if they haven’t completed the initial training before. At this point, the user can complete either the initial course again or the renewal course and get re-certified. 

If you do this, make sure you have really clear and distinct thumbnails to guide the user to the correct choice. 
FYI, I explored this in the sandbox but did not it into production due to the risk. I was working with a learning plan as initial training and a course for renewal. It was a lot of admin work to “fix” a learning plan archive, so we said with the current manual workaround.

We are hopeful that the certification revamp will give us a better, less risk, path forward.  https://portal.productboard.com/npwrnbvnfrya8zlkldjheykv/c/74-certification-retraining-revamp

Thank you both @lrnlab and @dianex.gomez for helping with this so quickly. I really appreciate the extra perspective. Unfortunately we don’t have near the resource to manage an admin-intensive process, and most of our users will only interact with our learning platform every two years when they recertify, so there’s no way we could trust them to select the correct recert course.

I did work out overnight that I can use regional catalogs to restrict what users see when they renew, so by making only their regional course and the recert course available in their catalogs, after they complete their regional course they will only see the recert course when they renew. So I think for us, duplicating the recert course every year (with date availability restrictions) will be the safest and most automated way we can manage this. I do need to test a bit more to be sure, but so far it’s working. Fingers crossed.

Back again 

So this process works for new users. For our existing users, because of the way we were advised to use the equivalencies, their existing certifications were all imported against the (then) recertification course, not the actual (source) course. So according to Docebo they have never completed the actual course, and when they try to renew the source course shows up in their course options. We absolutely do not want this.

I was already aware this would happen, but wasn’t concerned because I planned to create groups to enrol these users in and complete the necessary source courses so they would no longer be valid renewal options. It doesn’t work. Even though the user now shows as having completed the source course, it still shows up in their renewal options. Anybody know why, or more importantly how to resolve it? I’m still waiting to hear back from Docebo support and need to address this quickly as the renewal process and courses are now live.

Renewal is set at the Certification level not the course/learning plan level. When you set the certification up to be able to renew, it is renewable for ALL courses associated with the certification. The user only sees the options they are enrolled in. 

What do you want them to see? It is one view for all users new and existing. 
 

The Docebo documentaiton on this functionality is quite clear. At least it appears to be. When the ‘Allow users to retake the same course’ option is disabled, when renewing certifications users should only see the courses associated with the certification that they have not yet completed.

So once I ernol and complete these users in the course they should no longer see that course in the renewal process/options. But they are.

I still haven’t heard back from Docebo support, so I’m hoping somebody else may have encountered this and know how to resolve it.

For anyone else who finds themselves down this path, the solution is not in the courses but the certifications.

You can do a manual ‘Award users’ from the certification, selecting the Association type of Course completion - selecting the course that you want ‘completed’. The downside of this is you need to specify the dates, so if you wanted to bulk update a group or branch you need them all to have the same expiry dates.

Alternatively, you can use the ‘Import cert records via CSV’ function, again using the course completion option. This way you can specify expiry dates per user record. Downside is there’s no way (well, none that I could find) to export cert details and expiry dates from Docebo. Luckily for us ours are exported to salesforce, so we can get them from there.

@gus What do you mean by exporting cert details? There are certification reports that give you date earned, expire date, how earned, etc. 

Thank you @dianex.gomez that’s very helpful. I didn’t even think of reports. I was completely blinkered into expecting to find an export option somewhere in the UI in the user or cert details.