we are working a lot with Certifications (for mandatory trainings that need to be repeated regularly) and we’d love to hear how you have solved this difficulty in your own organizations:
Teach user where to renew a Certification: qua the logic of the system, the first time a user needs to do a COURSE in order to receive their certification, listed under “My Courses and Learning Plans”. But then when the Certification deadline is up and needs to be renewed, the user has to go to the “Certifications & Retraining” page of “My Activities” and click the Renew Now button on their CERTIFICATION. (if they just redo the course, it does not, unfortunately and illogically, renew the certification)
This leads to a lot of confusion by our users. We have tried to make a good User Experience by using 2 tabs on our homepage with explanations, and by sending “Certification needs to be renewed” notifications via email with a link onto the correct page - but it does not go smoothly.
Do you have any best practices on how to lead your users to the correct places?
Thank you!
Best answer by pjensen
@Anges, we used Certifications for regularly repeated mandatory training and for certifications maintained by completing additional training. Unfortunately, after a couple of years, we concluded that the Certifications & Retraining app has serious shortcomings, such as the issues you describe. So until Docebo delivers on a long-promised (going on three years) redo of Certifications, we've decided to use regular courses to track certifications and retraining. Courses offer more flexibility in retraining, reporting, notifications, and other tools such as the Salesforce integration. Using courses requires more administration, but the end-user experience is more familiar to our users.
I've attached our process documentation on setting up certifications and subsequent maintenance of certifications. You may find something useful in our approach. We've successfully used this process for several years. Our goals in creating and using this process were to:
Record and track initial certification of a learner based upon completion of one or more courses.
Record and track annual maintenance of the certification based on completion of different training each year.
Provide a single place to find/confirm a learner's current certification status.
@Agnes I am sorry you are frustrated with the system! We are working on creating certifications within our platform but haven’t launched them yet. Ours will not be timed or expire like yours, but rather will be consistently updated… they are certifications on technology training (and as we know, technology is in a constant state of flux) so while we will not have renewals per-say, we will be updating/modifying the content in the certification course to stay up-to-date with the tech. We were thinking about doing that quarterly, and adding a badge with a date to let the network know that a specific person has been certified in a specific tech and what year.
Very interested in your use-case and the renewal aspect…. wondering why/how going to a certification is different than going to a course, isn’t it the same thing?
@Anges, we used Certifications for regularly repeated mandatory training and for certifications maintained by completing additional training. Unfortunately, after a couple of years, we concluded that the Certifications & Retraining app has serious shortcomings, such as the issues you describe. So until Docebo delivers on a long-promised (going on three years) redo of Certifications, we've decided to use regular courses to track certifications and retraining. Courses offer more flexibility in retraining, reporting, notifications, and other tools such as the Salesforce integration. Using courses requires more administration, but the end-user experience is more familiar to our users.
I've attached our process documentation on setting up certifications and subsequent maintenance of certifications. You may find something useful in our approach. We've successfully used this process for several years. Our goals in creating and using this process were to:
Record and track initial certification of a learner based upon completion of one or more courses.
Record and track annual maintenance of the certification based on completion of different training each year.
Provide a single place to find/confirm a learner's current certification status.
@Agnes … Our extended enterprise has backed off Certifications/Retraining for some of the same reasons that have been listed here, but I’m wondering if there is a way that you can create custom content box widget on your learner’s dashboard that links over to the Certifications & Retraining page?
There is a tutorial for creating a SuperAdmin dashboard that discusses creating CCB’s that link to other pages. It could give you some of the details to try.
Hey @Agnes, the Certifications & Retraining app can work well if you have a single course or learning plan that will not change or require much updating that you need your learners to take repeatedly at a consistent frequency (i.e. every 365 days).
If you imagine that there will be frequent changes to the course or courses required for your certification, or if you need to create maintenance courses that are different than the “core” certification course, I’d recommend taking a similar approach to what @TaviaRitter and @pjensen shared.
@pjensen your certification and maintenance tracking document is an absolute gold mine! Thank you for sharing. It’s very clever to use the Certified: ‘Product Course’ to track the status of all of your learners and to use an automatic group with enrollment status based conditions to maintain the core group of learners who are initially certified. The process you outlined seems like a great option for anyone looking to require learners to complete a certain course for their initial certification and then to complete a different course or set of courses to maintain their certification.
I have one question for you about your process:
Typically, completion of the course maintains the certification for one year but can be any length of time.
^ what length of time does your organization use for certification maintenance? Do you establish that everyone certified within a given window, let’s say, a 6 month period, is required to complete the Maintenance of Certification course by a specific deadline (with everyone in that group sharing the same deadline)? Do you manage the deadline for the maintenance on a per-individual basis (i.e. If I completed my initial certification a week before someone else, then my certification maintenance would be due a week before theirs)? Or do you use a different process altogether?
We have set up multiple renewal warning notification emails to send to users. Currently, they receive a warning 30 days prior to expiry, 7 days prior to expiry, and on the expiry date. That said, it can still be a challenge to get the learners through the process.
I’m not sure what you have included in your notification emails but we do provide the renew link so they aren’t required to navigate through the My Activities page. I’ve include a sample Source Code from one of our notifications below.
<p>[first_name], please note that your <strong>[cert_title]</strong> certification will expire on <spanstyle="color: #ff0000;">[cert_expire_at]</span>. Please click on the link below to renew:</p><p><ahref="[renew_link]">[renew_link]</a></p>
We currently use a standard annual re-certification date for everyone. Having an expected date for maintenance of certification (e.g., end of the year) is more accessible for our users to track. Plus, it's much easier to administrate. We also create new maintenance of certification courses each year based on product enhancements and support issues.
We remove the maintenance of certification course from the Certified: 'Product' Courses Enrollment Rule three months before the renewal date, so newly certified people don't have to complete the maintenance of certification for their first year of certification. We start including the content from the current maintenance of certification course in the initial certification training beginning at that time.
We started out managing the maintenance of certification on a per-individual basis but found it confusing to our users (i.e., someone may be certified in multiple products with different dates to renew their certifications) and the administrative overhead was high. That was before we started using automation with webhooks and the API, which could use the enrollment date in the Certified: 'Product' Course to individualize the maintenance of certification deadline.
@pjensen that makes perfect sense. I love the way you’ve set up your certification process. I agree with your approach to use a standard re-certification cadence for all learners. I’ve seen that adopted as a best practice by most companies handling product certifications. Thank you for this information!
We use certifications for our mandatory “Annual Training” and have encountered similar problems with users “retaking” the course through review mode, or resetting their certifications while still in progress. Our solution so far is as follows:
Initial enrollment is strictly based on Enrollment Rules. End users and Power Users cannot enroll mandatory training directly.
Lots of hand-holding through UI design. For example, we have a large “is it time to renew your Annual Training? go here” button at the top of the landing page that goes directly to their Certifications and Retraining page.
Groups based on Annual Training enrollment status, which determine what Menu / landing page the user is given: if Annual Training is Not Started/Subscribed or In Progress, the landing page guides users to their current course instead of the certifications page.
Using the Localization Tool, we’ve made significant modifications to the language of certification renewal. We repeatedly emphasize that it “resets” training and “erases” progress, put an extensive explanation on the renewal page, including a big red warning not to continue until they have read and understood the explanation.
We created channel assets explaining the process to both end users and Power Users, linked from the Course description and from the certification renewal page.
I have written numerous CSS rules that remove links and prevent users from entering review mode in as many places as we are able (“pointer-events: none;” is your friend). The biggest gap here is global search results.
Last but not least, we run a daily progress report so we can compare past activity against current when troubleshooting. No matter how many warning signs we put up, someone inevitably “climbs over the barrier” as it were.
There are lots of posts like this, and like many we are struggling with the fact people don’t know how to renew. Our biggest problem is people going back to the course page and retaking their old attempt rather than going to the renew area.
Whilst we all live in hope Docebo will make renewing training, and re-taking course easier i have question that may help us slightly. Can we remove or rename this section from the bottom of the course?
its this button which is causing people to go into their old attempt and completing without it being registered
Can anyone give some thoughts/tips on this. We are getting daily emails from people who tell us they have completed a module but their completion date has not updated.
How can we stop people from going directly to a course and retaking the old attempt. There must be a way of editing something on this page and adding a warning/link to the renew screen.
Can you let us know if there are plans to update the ‘renew’ experience, or if there is a way to hide the bottom ‘click here to begin your course’ link?
i just noticed this is made much worse in the new course player where you have a big button saying ‘RETAKE THE COURSE’. Anyone coming here will assuming by retaking that would count as ‘renewing’ the module. i have tested and it doesn't record a new date. This is very disappointing.
Well - having been moaning about this, as if by magic there is a new ‘renew certification’ button appear on the platform this morning. Perhaps I wasn't aware this was coming but its a welcome addition.
Our biggest struggle is that we have a large portion of our organization who use a middle person to enroll and keep track of trainings called a Training Rep. We have these reps assigned power user permissions and they enroll people into classes.
The issue is that is a training rep enrolls a user in a course when they are up for renewal. Is there a way to reset the clock when an admin enrolls someone. For example, First Aid/CPR is a certification that occurs every two years. If admin enrolls someone who is due and they take the course, their certification does not reset. This logic is confusing to learners if admin enrolls someone in an ILT it seems like it should restart a certification window.
Our biggest struggle is that we have a large portion of our organization who use a middle person to enroll and keep track of trainings called a Training Rep. We have these reps assigned power user permissions and they enroll people into classes.
The issue is that is a training rep enrolls a user in a course when they are up for renewal. Is there a way to reset the clock when an admin enrolls someone. For example, First Aid/CPR is a certification that occurs every two years. If admin enrolls someone who is due and they take the course, their certification does not reset. This logic is confusing to learners if admin enrolls someone in an ILT it seems like it should restart a certification window.
Has this been improved at all?
We are having this issue as well. We have our “Safety Professionals” mark completions for users and the renewal doesn’t update after the first time. The course and the renewal has to be updated separately. Have you been able to come up with a solution or easier work around?
Our biggest struggle is that we have a large portion of our organization who use a middle person to enroll and keep track of trainings called a Training Rep. We have these reps assigned power user permissions and they enroll people into classes.
The issue is that is a training rep enrolls a user in a course when they are up for renewal. Is there a way to reset the clock when an admin enrolls someone. For example, First Aid/CPR is a certification that occurs every two years. If admin enrolls someone who is due and they take the course, their certification does not reset. This logic is confusing to learners if admin enrolls someone in an ILT it seems like it should restart a certification window.
Has this been improved at all?
I started an idea to add a checkbox to the edit enrollment which would also push the completion dates/expiration dates to the courses tied renewals. Please upvote and support the cause!
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