Let’s face it: Even in our ever-more-paperless world, sometimes you just need cold hard proof of professional certification and licensure. Whether mounted on the wall or tucked in a wallet, printed credentials are nowhere near a thing of the past. They both offer a tangible sense of recognition and even help promote your brand’s visibility.
If the profession that you regulate confers printed credentials, your board staff are likely no strangers to the printer. If you don’t have certificate printing capabilities built into your credential management system, you may still be in the age of manual management. It doesn’t have to be that way!
Professional, Configurable Templates: Design Your Printing
If you’re going to go to the trouble of putting ink to paper, you want to ensure the end result looks how you want it to. You also need all of the necessary information displayed correctly.
LearningBuilder’s customizable templates are designed for high-quality printing. These templates keep your branding front and center while streamlining the design process for multiple file sizes, including wall certificates and wallet cards. Have formal elements like seals and signatures? System Administrators can define document templates suitable for producing high-fidelity printed documents with a high degree of precision. The Heuristics team will design and “load” them into the system.
Defining Print Queues: Organize Your Printing
Likely, you won’t need to print all your various credential templates all the time. For example, an initial conferral may require a wall certificate and a wallet card, and recertification or renewal may only necessitate an updated wallet card. You’ll also have one-off re-prints, name changes, and replacements to manage.
With LearningBuilder, your program administrators can define different “print queues” that align with your program processes. Each queue has a unique name associated with one or more of your printing templates. For example, you may want your initial certification queue to include a wallet card and a certificate template. Our team can help you configure your print queues and determine what actions or business events add to the queue, like completing payment or submitting an application.
Whenever someone is added to a print queue, LearningBuilder renders every associated template as a background processing service. This is both to provide scalability and avoid system performance issues. LearningBuilder stores the resulting HTML document in the database.
Managing the Print Queues: Monitor Your Printing
As candidates submit applications or complete other actions, they will be rendered and added to the print queues. Your print operator will now check that all documents are in the correct format, are printing properly, and include the correct information. They can do a quality assurance check on a PDF version of the print, and send it back for corrections until the the file is exactly right. Once you are satisfied with the electronic rendering of the credential, you’re ready to print.
Print Jobs: Make the Printing Happen (and Track It)
When you create a print job in LearningBuilder, all documents in a queue that are ready to print are packaged up into a batch. For an added layer of quality assurance, you can limit your initial print job to one or two records. That way, you can check those prints for resolution quality and correctness before sending the entire batch. Our robust management tools allow for streamlined template changes and reprints until you get your files exactly right.
A print job also generates a .csv file with address information and mailing label instructions. Those can either go to the mailing service or you can use an in-house mail merge to generate labels. Upon a successful print run, the print operator marks the print job as “complete” to indicate that all documents were printed and mailed.
What happens when a practitioner calls in and asks, “Where’s my stuff?” Or, maybe they’ve received their documents, but something is wrong with the prints. Every member profile will have a section called “Printed Documents” where records of their printed documents live. Your staff can check their status and check the associated PDFs. Within a few clicks, you’ll know if the issue is on your side or the printer’s side, and your caller will have a resolution.
Digital Records: Not Just for Practitioner Printing
Do you assign responsibility for printing credentials to the credential holders themselves? If so, you may never need to print your templates at all — you can just provide the files for download.
All of LearningBuilder’s printed documents also come with the ability to view and download a PDF version of the credential. That doesn’t mean they aren’t being tracked, however; they also come with a matching digital record. All of these digital records are available to system administrators. We also offer a searchable database for the public to verify credentials.
LearningBuilder: Software to Streamline License Management Processes
Whether it’s the annual deadline rush or the edge case disruption, printed credentials shouldn’t be dreaded. They should just happen. That axiom is one we apply to all of our customers’ credentialing workflows. Looking for more from your technology solutions? If you’ll be in Baltimore for the CLEAR Annual Education Conference next month, be sure to stop by our complimentary headshot studio (booth #17) or schedule a time to talk before, during, or after the event. We look forward to hearing more about your program!
