Are you deciding what counts toward recertification, or is your software (and its limitations) deciding for you?
Pre-approved CE and simple CE tracking are easy to administer, but they can flatten the maintenance-of-certification picture of how a professional actually stays current. At the same time, the activities that often signal the deepest professional rigor and engagement are usually the first to get cut. Why? Because they’re the hardest to capture and evaluate. It’s not that the activities matter less. It’s the challenge of recognizing them at scale: collecting the right data, evaluating it, and assigning value according to your business rules, all without burying your staff in administrative work.
What if you didn’t have to make that trade-off? With the right recertification management software, the recertification activities you “count”won’t be limited to what your team (and technology) can operationalize. The system handles the complexity, so the question shifts from what you can accept to what you want to recognize.
Beyond CE: Recognizing a Range of Recertification Activity
Practitioners participate in a variety of professional activities that can be recognized for recertification or maintenance of certification. Here are some of the ways professionals can demonstrate ongoing competence:
- Teaching: Instructing a course deepens mastery and should be considered for credit.
- Writing assessment items: Creating test questions for exams or assessments is a rigorous opportunity for professionals to learn via review of the current educational content and from each other in the review process.
- Substantial academic work: Extended academic commitments differ from standard continuing education and should be valued appropriately in recertification plans.
- Reading and reflection: Reviewing recent journal articles on relevant topics helps practitioners stay informed about the latest evidence in their field.
- Volunteer work: You might also want to recognize people who engage with their professional community through item writing, mentorship, board membership, or other forms of service.
It’s not a leap to recognize the value of these activities. The challenge is to capture and evaluate them alongside traditional CE without placing excessive burden on your staff.
Beyond CE Tracking: The Power of a Robust Requirements Model
Even within continuing education, “CE” is rarely one undifferentiated bucket. Programs routinely use multiple characteristics or dimensions to measure how much an activity “counts.” One is accredited versus non-accredited CE, where a program might require a certain amount of accredited CE or assign a higher value to accredited CE. Another is domain-specific versus general CE, in which a program might require that a specified percentage of reported hours relate directly to specific KSAs.
The most complex candidate handbooks detail rules for a wide range of creditable activities, each carrying a different weight or “points value” toward the overall recertification requirements. A simple CE tracker won’t be able to keep track of all the program requirements.
The LearningBuilder Difference: Recertification Management, Made Manageable
LearningBuilder’s highly configurable activity types and file upload capabilities can capture the exact data needed to demonstrate and evaluate non-CE activities.
An Example of a Non-Ce Learning Activity
If you decide, for example, that you want to accept professional publications in order to fulfill recertification requirements, this is how it looks in LearningBuilder. You can choose what kinds of publications you accept, and how much they are worth depending on authorship.
How We Organize Your Professional Development Requirements
We can implement a requirements model that balances rigor and flexibility. This requirements model may specify a minimum number of certain activity types and assign the appropriate value to everything else.
Plus, LearningBuilder can translate even highly complex candidate handbooks to enforce all of your rules, domains, and dependencies.
LearningBuilder: Recertification Management Software to Fit Your Program Needs
We designed LearningBuilder to empower programs to expand their ability to capture what earns credit for recertification — without impacting the day-to-day administrative resource spend. Your software should expand your program possibilities, not define them through limitations.
If you’ve been shrinking your recertification aspirations to fit the path of least resistance, we would love to help you achieve your vision for continuing competence. Ready? We’d love to learn more about your program. Schedule a discovery call with us to get started!
