Every year, we look forward to the annual I.C.E. Exchange. It’s a chance to get together with industry colleagues and listen, learn, and share. We love to connect with our community and hear about what’s on their minds (and wish lists).
As you may already have guessed, there was much talk of artificial intelligence in testing design and delivery. However, AI was far from the only talked-about topic!
Here are some of our biggest takeaways from this year’s conference conversations:
Processes, Relationships, and the Certification Lifecycle
Organizations continue to seek improved technology solutions for the full lifecycle of their certification programs. As they consider their next solution, we hear them articulate a subtle, but crucial distinction: relationship management is about people, and certification management is about process.
A certification management process has starting points and endpoints with steps between. During those steps, information flows between applicants, the organization, and third parties (like employers and educators).
Within a major process like an initial application, there can be many minor processes that collect and approve all the data required to determine eligibility. For example, employment verification and license verification might be two minor processes within a larger application for specialty certification. A CRM or other “people management” platform may be able to handle some of these processes, but can it manage them all? For example, what happens with exceptions, audits, or when a candidate fails their exam?
When a solution is built specifically to support process management rather than candidate communications or the relationship between the individual and organization, all those minor processes that make up an application can unfold independently and in parallel. It also means an organization won’t have to constantly rebuild them with different tools and workarounds. That’s part of why LearningBuilder succeeds as a certification management platform: It’s designed for how certification management works. We bring clarity to the complexity of certification management. And, LearningBuilder can even send emails (and text messages), too!
Certifications, Licensure, and State Regulations
Recently, we’ve observed a heightened interest from state boards in using certifications or certification exams for licensure. For a certification organization, this raises questions on how to support states that may require participation in the candidate eligibility process and receive exam scores.
Specialty certification boards also have a role to play in ongoing licensure maintenance, which usually requires continuing education in some form. Either a specialty certification itself can meet the educational requirement for licensure renewal or the continuing education required for certification maintenance can also be used for license renewal. An organization that can provide a downloadable transcript of CEs reported for recertification can help their practitioners maintain the license.
LearningBuilder powers — and empowers — relationships between certification organizations and licensing boards. From approving eligibility to test to sharing exam scores, managing ongoing professional development activities, and even automating license verification, our software can reduce the administrative load on both sides of the exchange. Everybody wins — including the public.
Training, Education, Standards, and Governance
We’ve also heard from certification organizations that want to bring learning activities from their own learning management system (LMS) into the certification or recertification process. This is always a touchy subject at the I.C.E exchange, as many organizations are NCCA accredited. When organizations offer both certification and education, it does raise the governance concern of “teaching to the test.” Yet, unmet demand can drive the need for certification programs to enter this space.
Business drivers aside, LearningBuilder supports key practices for organizations with these governance concerns:
Establish standards and an approval process for providers and courses.
Continuing education (CE) standards determine what is minimally acceptable for the credential. These standards also offer guidance to the education and training market. While this may not completely allay governance concerns, it goes a long way to foster both transparency and competition.
Organize learning activities within the exam domain blueprints.
A certification organization’s job task analysis (JTA) work can offer important insights into the evolution of the work being done with practice areas. As a result, the JTA identifies domains for ongoing professional development needs. This applies to both entry into practice and the maintenance of skills over time.
Organizing either internally sponsored or externally provided learning activities by domain area equips an organization to support practitioners in closing gaps (if the JTA changed since they passed the exam). It also offers a roadmap for the professional development required for entry into practice.
Provide a public, searchable registry of learning activities.
When an organization makes it easy to access professional development that both meets their standards for quality and closes specific gaps for practitioners, everyone benefits.
LearningBuilder software has built-in tools for provider and course approvals. We can also organize learning content according to the exam content outline and support searchable course and provider catalogs. But that’s not all: We also streamline the collection and approval of professional development activities. Our new data exchange platform (the Learning Hub) supercharges data exchange between organizations, their LMS, and other third-party learning management systems.
LearningBuilder: Process Management for Certification Ecosystems
Certification organizations and boards continue to explore engagement with their larger credentialing ecosystem. They are evolving to meet the needs of their constituents, the industry, and the public. As they do so, their technology partner needs to understand their unique position in the credentialing ecosystem. They also need to support the full spectrum of functionality required.
Does that sound familiar? Are you ready to hear more? Be sure to attend our Introduction to LearningBuilder webinar next Tuesday, December 17th for a high-level look at what our software can do. Or, schedule a 1:1 discovery call to explore how we can optimize your programs!
