What’s the difference between a good certification and a great certification?
A good certification is tough to achieve but fair in its requirements. It should be backed by evidence, address a clear need, and make a demonstrable impact.
A great certification is all of those things, but it also provides a welcoming, clear, and streamlined experience for anyone who seeks to achieve it.
As certification professionals, our goal should be to make the certification qualifications rigorous, but the process easy.
More often than not, we see certification standards hidden behind downloadable PDFs spanning 300+ pages. These are the defining documents of any certification business, and they deserve their chance to shine. The guidelines for any certification should be accessible, navigable, and useable for our customers.
We should avoid having people scroll through endless pages of deeply detailed information just to achieve our certification.
That’s where a digital standard comes in.
What do we mean by digital standard?
Whether you’re providing certifications for sustainability, ethically sourced clothing, workplace safety, or the myriad other offerings in our industry, your users should be able to find, interpret, and navigate the information in your certification standard with relative ease.
When we say “digital standard” we’re talking about a fully online, digital representation of your guiding documents. Similar to an online wiki or directory, it should be searchable. It should be clearly organized and easy to navigate with collapsible sections and a content hierarchy that makes sense. And it shouldn’t require your users to download anything.
“Why?” You may ask. It’s simple: it provides a better certification experience for your people. Period.
But if that’s not enough to convince you, here are some practical reasons why you should make digital the standard for your certification standard.
Delight your users
The most important aspect of your certification business is your customers. Without them, the doors close and the lights go out. We need folks to implement these standards and achieve certifications to truly see and feel the impact of what’s being offered.
With a digital certification standard, you can make it easier for the people who will ultimately become your biggest advocates. A digital standard allows customers to search through requirements with ease. It allows them to bookmark pages for future reference. It can provide them with references, examples, pictures, sample projects, and other helpful details that help them successfully implement your standards for their projects.
A user-friendly digital experience can unburden your customer support teams because your clients will know where to look for answers and how to find them. Let’s go deeper: you can even integrate your digital standard with other online tools like a resource library, case studies and blog articles, a knowledge base, your online communities, live chat technologies, and more.
The possibilities are substantial when you move away from the restrictions of a PDF-based document.
But what truly lies at the heart of all these perks is the opportunity to delight your customers. A digital standard is an acknowledgment that you’ve thought of their needs and made them a priority.
Simplify versioning, addenda, and updates
Certification standards are living documents. Routinely, you’ll need to roll out updates, addenda, and new versions to ensure your customers have access to the latest information and best practices for their certification journey.
This process can get tedious, clunky, and difficult to track when using PDF files. It becomes even harder to manage if you’re allowing users to work from different versions of your standard. While some project participants may be working from a Standard revised in Q2 of 2023, others could be pulling information from the Q1 2024 update.
A digital standard streamlines the process of version control by allowing for real-time updates and clear versioning history. It allows you to revise your existing standard in a matter of seconds—depending on your internal processes—and host archived versions within the same online instance. You could even designate the specific version needed for projects working on a legacy version of your certification standard, ensuring that all participants receive the information they need.
Speak the language of your people
With any international certification, it can be tricky to ensure your PDFs are translated and hosted in a way that people, regardless of region, can find and access them. The digital standard solves this issue with the click of a button.
The digital standard allows users to navigate to a single URL and select their language. With deeper integrations, we can identify their browser location and use that information to display the standard in their preferred language.
Moreover, if your certification has different requirements based on locality, a digital standard provides flexibility and ease of use that your regional teams will love. You can allow them to update and revise content based on the particulars within their region without impacting the larger standard itself.
The digital standard can simplify your translation approach, streamline your workflows, and improve the overall experience for both users and staff.
Become accessible to anyone, anywhere
Using a digital approach for your certification standard opens new avenues for how people interact with your information and your business. Where PDFs are locked into a single display format, your digital standard can be optimized and tailored for different devices—like tablets or mobile phones—making the information easy to access. Imagine users being able to pull up your standard on their phone while they’re making a site visit to check on project progress.
A digital standard approach can also accommodate the myriad needs of people with different abilities. With your digital standard, you can provide information to those who are colorblind, need speech-to-text assistance, or require different modes of on-page navigation. It should be our goal to make your information accessible and inclusive to all, and that means meeting ADA and WCAG compliance requirements.
Standout to your customers
When you bring your certification standard out from behind the wall of a PDF file, you open it up to popular search engines across the internet. For those familiar with marketing tactics and strategy, a well-indexed and optimized piece of content can attract new customers to your business.
The digital standard format provides an entirely new avenue for potential users to engage with you. If your certification is centered around ethical practices in the supply chain, for example, your standard is loaded with high-value keywords targeting those exact terms.
Ipso facto, anyone searching Google using those terms is going to see your digital standard—front and center—and understand exactly what your certification entails.
A digital standard can be a powerful tool for dominating search traffic and standing out to new customers.
A better certification experience is possible
Converting outdated certification PDFs into a digital standard that’s easy to explore and friendly enough to keep users on the right track means we’ve done our part to ensure their success. Our goal should always be to equip them with the information and resources they need to achieve their goals, and a digital standard provides just another opportunity to delight your customers and streamline their process.
To recap: PDFs — do they technically work to convey information? Yes!
Is that approach the best it could be for our people? Not by a country mile.
In other words, if we’re expecting the best from our certification clients, we should be doing our best for them.
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