Although online education offers many benefits like ease of access from any part of the globe, cost, convenience, etc., there are also many risks and challenges. Training institutes, associations, corporates, and universities face difficulty with online credentialing owing to increasing online fraud and data theft incidents. Consequently, it becomes difficult for them to verify whether a badge or certificate is genuine. In the education sector, provider credentialing remains one of the major compliance issues. Lack of data insight and process oversight, errors can occur in credentialing. This can adversely affect your organization in terms of reputation and license. In addition, compromised privacy and incomplete credentials can be disastrous. When run poorly, Credentialing systems can cause enrollment issues and financial and legal complications. Therefore, there’s a need to ensure your credentialing system is managed well. This is where Sertifier can help. So, let’s deeply understand challenges in credentialing, how to overcome them, and how Sertifier can help you there.
Challenges in Credentialing
Some of the common challenges that organizations face in credentialing are as follows:
Accessing Updated and Accurate Data
Accessing and verifying information in a certificate or badge is challenging for organizations. A majority of them have outdated, inaccurate, and missing information. So, ensuring a candidate has acquired the skills mentioned in the credential is important. This will help you avoid reputational damage, compliance risks, and more.
Time-consuming
Credentialing can be a time-consuming process. If you need to generate certificates and badges in bulk, it will take a lot of time to do this manually for each. And if your organization involves additional stakeholders like third parties, it may take even more time to generate a credential, let alone publish and distribute them.
Difficulty in Changing Platforms
If you use a credential system that does not support your growth, it can become a headache. And if you want to change the platform, you may risk losing some data, which can pose privacy concerns. In order to align the system with your growing needs, you would require a lot of integrations, which further becomes complex. This is why many organizations are stuck with just one tool, which reduces the efficiency of their credentialing process.
Meeting Compliance and Regulations
Every region or country has some standards for data privacy, which you must know and abide by. However, online privacy risks are increasing with time. So, if you don’t use a secure system, you might have to face many compliance and regulation risks. Also, regulations can vary from region to region and may change at any time. Hence, keeping up with all the compliance and regulations criteria changes becomes difficult for organizations to manage. And if they don’t do it well, they might have to suffer in terms of compliance risks, reputation, and penalties.
Managing Security and Privacy
Since online fraud and data theft concerns rapidly increase, managing data privacy and security has become critical. This requires thorough background checks for credentialing. Apart from eligibility criteria such as previous credentials and degrees attained, organizations must perform background checks on students to ensure security and privacy. Credentialing institutions must check students’ malpractice history and other critical activities, which is also difficult. And to help you with that, you need a credentialing platform like Sertifier to interact with other databases and keep the information updated and secure. Moreover, many organizations face issues while implementing an online digital credentialing system. This could be due to inadequate preparation. And if you want to implement a digital credentialing system seamlessly in your organization, you must focus on overcoming those challenges.
How to Overcome
Here are some tips to overcome the credentialing challenges for organizations:
Understand the Need: Implementing a digital credentialing platform in your company or organization requires you to understand its need first. So, figure out, do you require it. If you do, analyze the prevailing education process in your organization, how the platform can fill the gaps, and discover ways to use it.Awareness: Implementing something new requires awareness about it. So, ensure to educate and make your team aware of the digital credentialing system before setting it up. Tell them how it can help solve your team’s challenges and improve your productivity and efficiency. Effective Implementation Plan: To successfully implement a digital credential platform, you must make an effective program. It will help you learn all the challenges you might face and ways to overcome them using the tool. It will also allow you to identify and solve issues. Start by rolling the platform out in a small department or area within your organization. This will analyze the participants’ reactions and then gradually roll out to rest with better planning. Collaboration: Creating digital badges and certificates involves plenty of planning and skills. Hence, you might seek help from multiple organizations to make the launch smooth.
How Can Sertifier Help?
Sertifier is a badge generator platform that will help you create, send, and track professional digital badges. This digital badge solution will help you reward your students, employees, or attendees with secure and authentic certificates and badges. It’s trusted by thousands of training providers, corporates, universities, and associations. Some notable organizations using Sertifier are the University of Texas, Philip Morris International, GrowthTribe, Sanofi, and more. Using this digital badge management software is easy. It automates the overall process of creating and distributing badges you can track and share with others after course completion. It has a smooth interface, useful features, and the option to integrate it with other tools. Overall, Sertifier revolutionizes how educators and organizations create and distribute verified certificates and badges.
Features
Issuing Digital Certificates
You can easily create and send certificates and badges on autopilot with Sertifier’s intuitive, user-friendly interface. For creating them, you will get many features, such as:
Skill Library: Different organizations may offer different types of courses and training. And Sertifier has a skill library with a variety of designs. Thus, instead of choosing any random design, you can choose the one matching the skill set a learner has acquired and create certificates accordingly.Professional designs: You can use a drag-and-drop tool to design your badges and certificates. It will have awesome design elements and is easy to use by just dragging and dropping the elements you like. Sertifier also offers eye-catching templates that you can use or upload the one you make from scratch.Custom variables: Using this automated certificate platform, you can place different variables on the design you are working on. It will also place custom earner information automatically on the design when creating the certificate.Evidence: You will get to know important things like the time the course took place, whether the student had gone through a test during the course, etc. You can also see if the course has a video recording. Using this evidence, you will enable the certificate earners to remember the course they have completed.
Open Badges
You can create open badges with the help of an easy-to-use badge designer and reward them to the learners. It will help verify their skills and achievements. In addition, Sertifier’s badges are compliant with IMS Global Open Badges 2.0. This implies that all pieces of information listed below will be automatically added to a badge file generated and allowed to be shared across any platform.
Badge name and URLEarning evidenceEarner informationIssuing institutionIssue DateExpiration dateEarned skills
Branding
Sertifier offers a premium white labeling feature to help you strengthen your brand image. Using fully branded badges and certificates will also help you improve your online visibility. You will get features like:
Custom domain: All your badges and certificates would be presented on your domain to help make the recipient feel more comfortable. Navigation bar: You can change the button’s destination URL on the navigation bar. It will enable you to get traffic on your site from every badge or certificate you issue.Certificate library: You will be given a certificate library with a verification page to verify each badge, credential, and certificate. Metadata: There’s an option to modify the metadata of the verification page. It will help you make the certificates look better when shared with others.
Data Security and Privacy
Sertifier focuses on security and privacy, given the increasing online risks. It stores your data at a secure data center with tier 3 SOC 2 certification.
Social Share
You can allow the learners to share their badges and credentials on their social media platforms, such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc. It takes just one click to do this and get noticed by potential employers.
Analytics
Measuring the performance of your credentials is important. It will help you spot issues and fix them to improve engagement rates. With Sertifier, you can track your badges and certificates and how the learners are using their issued credentials.
Top skills: By looking at the detailed reports, you can discover the top talents inside your organization and institution. This information will help you work on your weaknesses while using your strengths to the maximum.Shares and clicks: You can track each badge and certificate sent to earners and check the number of clicks and shares. It will help you monitor your organic marketing efforts.Exporting: You can export all the reports from Sertifier to MS Excel with just a click. Now, you can use them according to your requirements. Industry reports: Using industry reports, you will get to know other players in your industry. You can watch out for their strong and weak points and discover ways to be ahead in the race.
Integrations
Sertifier allows you to integrate it with an e-learning platform or a Learning Management System (LMS). You can do this through its API library. Some of the solutions it integrates with are Zapier, Zoom, Salesforce, HubSpot, Gmail, Facebook, Slack, Moodle, Canvas, ActiveCampaign, and more.
Benefits
Some of the benefits of using Sertifier are:
Automating the process of sending digital certificates and badges to save time and effortTracking and verifying certificates and badges and finding how they are being usedWhite labeling the credentials to highlight your brand and improve its online presenceEasy-to-use user interface with options like drag and drop to make the creation of certificates and badges easily One-click share of credentials to showcase skills and knowledge learned with potential employers and social networksAPI interaction with different learning platforms will help you bring everything under a simple umbrella and improve your efficiency.
Who Uses Sertifier?
Thousands of organizations from across the world use Sertifier, including:
K-12sHigher Education InstitutionsTraining and course providersCorporationsSMBs and SMEsMOOCsStartupsFreelancersAgencies
How to Setup and Use Sertifier
Getting started and working with Sertifier is simple. Since there’s a free plan available, you can create your Sertifier account without paying anything. When creating the account, you will enter your name, surname, email, phone, and organization’s name and create a strong password. Once your account is ready, you can log in and create your certificate and badge based on your requirements. Follow these steps to proceed with Sertifier:
Step 1: Create a certificate
Use Sertifier’s digital badge maker to easily design your badges. You will need to enter credential details and data on the achievement of a candidate. This will help you create the badge or certificate with a few clicks.
Step 2: Publish and share
Once you have created your badge, you can review it and publish it through the badge generator. The good thing is Sertifier will also allow you to generate badges in bulk so that you don’t do everything separately for each badge, saving you plenty of time. The platform will also provide badge earners with a link that they can use to access their certificate and share it on social media platforms. It will help them showcase their knowledge and expertise in a specific field with all the details.
Step 3: Track engagement
Once you distribute the badges, you’re not done. How would you know if it was perceived well by the earners and the people with whom the badges were shared? Don’t worry; you can track how the earners engage with the digital badges and learn the online presence your brand has created. You will also get to keep track of all your published certificates and credentials.
Pricing
There are four pricing models:
FREE: it’s free of cost. It includes features – up to 20 recipients, a skill library, professional templates, automation, and overview and audience reports.Essentials: It starts from $25. It includes 250/500/1000 recipients, tracking reports, API key access, and premium branding.Pro: Reach out to their sales team to get the pricing. It will include custom recipients, email branding, collections, marketing and engagement analytics, and enhanced branding.Enterprise: Get a suitable pricing structure based on your exact requirements.
Alternatives
Certifier
Certifier is a professional certificate-making platform. Its digital credentialing infrastructure offers everything you need to create and send certificates. It has many impressive features like certificate builder, analytics, templates, security options, etc., to simplify certificate generation. Certificates generated by this reliable platform will help you demonstrate your experience and knowledge concisely and clearly. This solution is useful for various purposes, from creating digital credentials and certificates to issuing, verifying, sharing, and managing them. Some of its main features include:
Customizable objects, text, and fonts300+ templatesPersonalization for style, colors, and brandingThe option to change certificate sizeCustomizable and dynamic attributesEffortless recipient managementMarketing Analytics
Certifier is useful for courses, alternative education, webinars and conferences, corporate training, events and symposia, boot camps and workshops, and product companies. Get free or choose a paid plan starting from $19/month.
Accredible
Accredible is one of the most comprehensive platforms for digital certificates and badges. Whether you are transitioning from print to digital medium, wanting to enhance your current certificates, or starting from scratch is great. This platform will handle every credentialing such as product and professional training, higher education, etc., so you can focus on improving learning experiences. Its important features are the following:
White labeling and branding options to showcase your brandShareable certificatesFull-service digital credentialing for badges, certificates, diplomas, digital wallets, and blockchain credentials in a single placeAdvanced tools for data and analytics
Its pricing starts from $960/year.
Final Words
A digital badge and certification platform is a great way to ensure the credentials are authentic and avoid reputational damage. Platforms like Sertifier are revolutionizing the modern education system, which is moving online rapidly. Thus, this solution can create, share, and track your certificate with ease and security. Next, check out the best digital certificate maker and issuer platforms.
