You’ve optimized your initial certification process. You’ve established how your practitioners will demonstrate continuing competence. What’s next? Maybe it’s time to expand your program and add a new certification offering.
For career-oriented professionals, certification offers a professional edge, greater mobility, and higher earning potential. For growth-oriented organizations, offering more than one certification is a means to further engage existing credential holders as well as broaden the certificant community.
Multiple Certifications: Organizational Drivers
When an organization offers more than one certification, it is helpful to understand how those certifications relate to one another. Are they meant to serve the same constituency, or expand an existing constituency? The answer will affect that organization’s specific program, process, and system design needs.
In our experience, organizations have three main ways to offer multiple certifications: Tiered, specialty, and additional/complementary.
Tiered Certifications Reflect Professional Mastery
As your practitioners progress in their professional lives, your certifications can offer a way to demonstrate their enhanced proficiency over the course of their careers. An “intermediate-” or “advanced-” level credential builds on the foundational material covered by the domains of the initial certification blueprint. Tiered certifications build upon each other, helping practitioners engage with an evolving competency framework based on their professional experience and development. Professionals with higher-level certifications are seen as a reflection of focus and commitment.
Specialty Certifications Deepen Practitioner Expertise
Some programs might encourage practitioners to focus their professional development efforts within a subset of domains that their initial certifications cover more broadly. This may create a demand for additional certifications within a specialty. Professionals with specialty certifications are seen as especially well-versed in specific techniques, equipment, topics, or demographics.
Additional Certifications Broaden Practitioner Skills
As practitioners grow in their careers, they may also seek out complementary areas for professional development. Related, complementary certifications contribute to professional versatility, mobility, and potential new career opportunities.
How LearningBuilder Supports Multiple Certifications
Of course, even one certification lifecycle can be a challenge to manage. Once you mix in multiple certifications, the deadlines and requirements can quickly feel like a juggling act for both staff and practitioners, especially during recertification.
What’s the solution? You need certification management software to make the process of adding or expanding credentials easier for both applicants and staff.
We designed LearningBuilder to support your success and the expansion of your program. LearningBuilder can help remove barriers to multiple certifications for both your applicants and your administrative staff. Here’s how:
The Candidate Dashboard Informs, Explains, and Inspires
In a multi-credential environment, practitioners need clarity and motivation to navigate certification lifecycles successfully. A well-designed candidate dashboard is even more essential.
The LearningBuilder candidate dashboard keeps practitioners informed and focused with clear descriptions of certifications and their requirements. When a practitioner logs in, they can easily view all their in-progress applications and the tasks they still need to complete. They can leave the system and return to pick up where they left off. As they navigate multiple certifications, LearningBuilder is the compass that keeps practitioners on track.
We can configure LearningBuilder to display the possibilities available to them as they progress in their certifications and achieve milestones. The system can also offer a call to action if a current certification opens a new path to more advanced or specialized credentials. Your practitioners stay motivated to continue their professional journey and informed of their possible next steps.
Standardized Renewal Cycles Simplify Certification Tracking
Once someone achieves a certification, they have to maintain it. Depending on multiple factors, this might mean tracking interim milestones or complex recertification requirements on divergent timelines.
With LearningBuilder, you have the option to establish a standard renewal cycle for multiple certifications. Instead of several deadlines, your practitioners only have to track one.
Activities Entered Once Count Toward All Relevant Applicants
Multiple certifications necessitate multiple applications. That means more information, more documentation, and more review, perhaps even with redundancies. Or does it?
LearningBuilder’s Portfolio feature helps minimize both applicant data entry and staff review tasks, making additional certifications all that much easier to manage.
With the Portfolio, applicants can enter work history, continuing education courses, and other professional achievements — once. LearningBuilder recognizes when something submitted to fulfill a requirement for one certification or recertification application satisfies the criteria for another and automatically adds it in both places.
These submitted activities can even automatically initialize a new application, and a pop-up notification can alert applicants when previously-submitted activities have initialized an application for them.
Once staff review and approve a submitted activity, it is functionally “pre-approved” for any other relevant application.
LearningBuilder: Certification Management Software, Simplified
Whether for initial certification or recertification, we believe that applications should be rigorous, but the application process should be straightforward. We also believe that your technology should never be the limiting factor of your vision for your program’s future. If you want to manage multiple certifications, we can make it happen — without heavy-duty custom coding or cumbersome workarounds.
If you’d like to learn more about our robust certification management solutions, we invite you to schedule a discovery call to see if we’re a fit for your needs.
