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Understanding how time options, certification expiration, & renewal policy interact

  • August 7, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 44 views

Thanks for providing this forum for us to discuss the new functionality!

I’ve looked in the platform and have read through the new knowledgebase articles, but I’m still confused about how time options, certification expiration, and renewal policy interact for our use case.

Our typical use case for certifications: 

  • A course/learning plan is connected to a certification
    • The course/learning plan has an enrollment validity period (due date), but soft deadline. We want learners to complete the content in a certain timeframe and for managers to see who is delinquent, but we don’t prevent learners from completing things after the due date.
  • The certification must be completed on a regular cadence, often annually 
    • The renewal enrollments also have enrollment validity periods (due dates) with soft deadlines

This is how I’m trying to set up the above scenario (see screenshots attached):

  • Time options: 
    • Enable Enrollment validity period from first enrollment (14 days from enrollment)
    • Enable soft deadlines for all courses in the certification
  • Recertification
    • Enable certification expiration, calculated from issue date
    • Renewal policy
      • Set a recertification window (30 days before expiration)
      • Renewal allowed with no deadline OR For a set number of days (unsure)

This is what’s unclear to me:

  • The learner will be re-enrolled into the courses/certification 30 days prior to the expiration and will be able to complete the renewal “with no deadline” or “For a set number of days.”
    • If we select “with no deadline" will the courses not have enrollment validity periods/due dates? 
    • If we select “For a set number of days" and set this to 30, does this set the enrollment validity period/due date to be 30 days from the start of renewal? Or is that 30 days tracked another way? Will the learner be locked out after those 30 days or do the soft deadline settings from the Time options tab apply?
    • We don’t want to lock learners out of training, but we need to indicate to them when they’re expected to complete courses. We use the “Digest: learner has yet to complete a course” notifications for this, which relies on the courses having enrollment validity periods/due dates.
  • For Certification expiration - calculate from the issue date: this help article uses the term “soft deadline” but the in platform guidance says “conventional deadline.” Can someone clarify this?

Thank you in advance for helping me understand how these new properties will interact with each other!

 

1 reply

Moshe.Machlav
Helper III
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Hey Hannah,

You are definitely not alone in this—the new Certifications & Retraining app introduces a lot of layered configurations, and it’s very common to get the Course-level time options confused with the Certification-level renewal policies.

To answer your specific questions:

1. If we select "with no deadline," will the courses not have enrollment validity periods? No, they will still have their due dates. The Course-level "Time options" (your 14-day validity) and the Certification-level "Renewal policy" run on two completely independent timers. When the renewal window opens 30 days prior to expiration and the learner is re-enrolled, the 14-day course timer triggers at that exact moment of re-enrollment.

2. How does "For a set number of days" track, and does it lock them out? If you set the renewal window to 30 days, this dictates how long the learner has to complete the certification before their certification status officially drops to "expired". It does not push a 30-day enrollment validity down to the individual courses. Because you enabled the soft deadline on the course's Time Options tab, the learner will never be locked out of the actual course content, even if they miss the 30-day certification renewal window.

3. Triggering the Digest Notification You are setting this up perfectly. Since the "Digest: learner has yet to complete a course" notification relies on the Course validity, you need to keep that 14-day setting. Pro tip: Docebo just released an update for this specific digest earlier this month (August 2026). Check out the "Extra Settings" tab in your notification configuration—you can now specifically filter the digest to only include courses where the enrollment validity has expired, which perfectly fits your requirement to only notify delinquent learners.

4. "Soft deadline" vs "Conventional deadline" This is just a minor discrepancy between the UI and the documentation. The Knowledge Base uses "soft deadline," but the new platform UI uses "conventional deadline." They function exactly the same way: allowing completion after the target date without a hard lockout.

For your reference on the exact mechanics, I recommend bookmarking the Managing Certifications KB article, as well as the Digest Notifications guide for that new extra setting.

Hope this helps clear things up!