Doctors, lawyers, and other professionals work hard every day to meet the expectations of their clients. To maintain the status that they’ve worked hard to achieve and the trust of all those clients, many are subjected to continuous learning requirements. Some may be dictated by professional groups like the American Medical Association.
The challenge for learners is getting documentation of their achievements promptly, routinely, and accurately. Professionals often need to prove that they completed the learning as required. Also, the World Health Organization (WHO) has recognized the need for recognition as a way to contribute to effective learning paths. It also studied the methods of standardizing recognition in healthcare to promote the benefits of lifelong learning.
The ability to recognize higher learning achievements in your LMS is a critical aspect that draws in learners and keeps them engaged through the process.
Recognizing higher learning achievements
When you leave high school or college, your hard work is rewarded in the diploma that you receive on graduation day. Given the nature of continuing education for associations, learners may ask you and even come to expect some form of recognition of higher learning achievement.
Even for adult learners, reinforcement through achievement helps promote positive outcomes. In a digital operating environment like a learning management system (LMS), providing recognition has gotten easier and more customizable.
The need for recognition is more than just to boost the learner's ego. It plays a role in elevating professional standards, as the WHO points out in proposing a "global framework for the recognition of learning achievement through credentialing." The goal is to establish a system that explains the meaning of certain credentials achieved through continuous learning.
An LMS can assist in providing a more structured approach. Using the tools available in your system, you can create strategic recognition programs to fit the circumstances of each learner based on their various needs and where they are in their professional development.
You can also try out specific approaches to see what works in terms of motivating and highlighting learning achievements and engaging your learners.
Badges
After a learner reaches a milestone achievement, such as completing a certain number of classes, the system can produce a badge signifying that moment. Badges provide validation and reinforcement and can motivate learners to keep striving for greater achievements. These items can also recognize specific milestones, such as when someone completes ten classes, twenty-five classes, fifty classes, etc. They show learners how far they have come. More importantly, they serve as "work-in-progress" recognition points because they can be placed on websites and embedded in emails, as a way of demonstrating competencies.
Certificates
A more enduring way of recognizing achievements is by providing learners with certificates of their achievements to mark the completion of a long curriculum. A certificate enables learners to tell the world what they have accomplished. It also provides them with documentation that can be important in career advancement, as it offers differentiation from peers.
Being able to show your success in completing programs of study may help set a member apart in a future job interview from someone who does not have the same certifications to showcase.
Let Elevate by Cadmium recognize professional learning achievements
Recognizing learning achievements serves many purposes, not the least of which is encouraging association members to excel and prompting them to engage within their communities.
An LMS like Elevate by Cadmium can simplify, automate and standardize the process of creating these recognitions. By automating the creation of recognition tools like certificates and badges, you can significantly motivate learners and support their journeys. An LMS can also enable you to help your members in another way: in many professions, such as law and medicine, professionals have to document their participation in continuing education to be able to retain their licenses and professional status.
Elevate by Cadmium helps fuel curriculum development, informal knowledge sharing, social learning, on-demand learning, and live events. With these formats at your fingertips, you can stimulate interest and loyalty from the members of your specific communities and help advance them toward their learning objectives. The platform also enables you to measure and track results and provides opportunities to turn your learning platform into money.
Elevate, the leading LMS for associations, enables professional educators to develop curricula, certifications, knowledge sharing, and social learning to help association members meet their learning objectives. Schedule a demo today to see how your association can use the platform to its advantage while delivering exceptional professional experiences.
