External Certifications & Licenses

What is it?

This feature is designed to give you a way to upload, manage and track Certifications or Licenses that are earned from sources other than LightSpeed.

One example use case for this would be if your Users attend a yearly HR training class, and at the end they receive a certificate / acknowledgement that they attended.

You can create that Certificate in LightSpeed’s External Certification feature, and upload digital copies of each certificate for each User. When adding the Certificate, you set an “issued date” and “expiration date” and then we’ll remind you when the Certificate is going to expire for each individual User.

How to Enable It

To Enable the External Certifications & Licenses feature, simply follow these four steps…

1. Go to Super User Dashboard and select [101] System Management
2. Expand the System Feature Toggles panel
3. Look for External Certification (towards the bottom of the list) and select Yes
4. Then Save the changes

The Home Page

On the External Certifications Home Page, what you see depends on what access level you are.

As a Super User B (Top Admin), you will see all 4 tabs across the top:

1. External Certifications

2. Manage User Certs

3. Reporting

4. Settings

Access Level 3 through 6 (Multi-Location Manager, and other Managers) will see tab 1, 2 and 3.

The Users and Certificates they can see are limited by normal LightSpeed User Access privileges such as which Location their User is in, and only Users equal or below their Access Level.

Access Level 7 and below (User A and others) will only see tab 1, and only be able to see their own Certifications.

There is also a link at the top right of this page “My Training Completion” that will direct you to your LightSpeed report card, which is a report card on the content you’ve trained on within LightSpeed.

1. External Certifications

This is the main view that end Users will visit, to view all of their Certificates. On this page, you can see all of your own certificates and licenses. Each Certificate is displayed by name, which Category it’s in, the Location it originates from, and when it will expire.

You can search and filter by All Certifications, Valid ones, Pending, Expiring, Expired, or Not Started.

2. Manage User Certs

Under the second tab, you can search and filter all Users by their User ID, Name, Location or Team. This page is designed to quickly find a User and either manage their existing Certifications or add a new one to them.

Under the ‘Manage’ column, if you select the ‘Edit’ pencil icon, you can view all of the certificates for the User and the Certificate status (expired, expiring soon, valid, etc.).

If you select the ‘Plus’ icon, you can add a new Certificate to the user, or you can submit new when editing the User.

On the Submit New Certificate page, you have the following options:

1. Select which Category to place it in (this is a required field). Selecting the Category will determine which Certificates are available to add in the next field. Note: Categories here are different from the Training Center Categories you may be familiar with, we cover this below on the 4. Settings page.)

2. Select a Certificate (this is a required field). The Certificates displayed here are determined by which Category is selected.

3. Enter the Certificate ID (optional) if needed

4. Select the Date Issued and the Date of Expiration. This date range will determine several “Status” updates that you’ll see throughout this area – Valid, Expiring Soon, Expired, etc.

5. Drag & Drop (or select “+ Attachments”) to add a digital copy of the Certificate. The file type can be any common type like PDF, image files, or Microsoft Office files.

6. Once all fields are filled out, click ‘Submit’ and you’ll be taken back to the User overview where you can edit, download or delete the Certificate, and also view the current status of all of the Certificates associated with the User.

3. Reporting

On the Reporting tab, you can choose from several different search and filter options to narrow down your search, or you can leave some fields blank to retrieve all results.

Once the results are shown, you can choose which column to sort the data by, export it to pdf, or xls file.

As mentioned above, the reporting tab is only available to Managers. Managers can only view Users in their own Location, and equal or less than their own Access Level.

4. Settings

The Settings tab is where you create Categories and Certificates.

Categories are required before creating a Certificate, as you will need to indicate which Category the Certificate is associated with.

Categories are available so you can better organize your various Certificates and Licenses. These can be named anything from “Employee Training Certificates” to “State Licensing” or whatever you need it for.

Create New Certificate or License

This page is where you will enter the official Certification or License that you can then give credit to your Users for completing. The Certificate must be added here first before awarding it to Users.

Here you can add the Name, keywords, the Category it resides in (mentioned above), the length of time the Certificate or License is valid, and when to notify both the User and their Manager of when the Certificate is going to expire.

Below that, select either a Content Role or a Team to assign the Certificate to. This selection will automatically assign the Certificate to each User in the role or on the Team, and it will show up immediately under their list of Certifications as “Not Started”

Once the User has completed the Certification, navigate to the User (Under the Manage User Certs tab), select the Certificate, and then submit the document. This will change the status from “Not Started” to “Valid”.