Introduction

The ability to have PDF copies of competency certificates has been requested by a lot of people – primarily as a way for people to be able to share the achievements outside of Compassly. We’re pleased to announce that PDF competency certificates are now available within the latest release of Compassly.

This is also a great feature for those providing certification of competencies – be that a third-party certification body or the employing organisation themselves. It means that you can provide a tangible record on-the-job training and certification – a laborious and patchy process to do manually. Certificates work for in-house standards or those that have been shared by other organisations, and support assessments carried out across multiple organisations.

How it works

Once a competency has been successfully completed, you’ll see a “View Certificate” option on the Competency Overview screen:

Tapping this will open up a copy of the PDF certificate:

If you’re on the mobile app you can share your certificate directly from the app, via email, text, WhatsApp – however you choose:

Or if you’re viewing on a web browser then you can download a copy to your computer.

Note that certificates are not available (and you will not see the “View Certificate” button) until a competency has been completed. Although there may be scenarios where you want to be able to demonstrate ongoing progress towards a competency, a “certificate” does suggest completion and therefore we only enable certificates for completed competencies.

The certificate is refreshed each time you access it, so you can quickly download a new version with the latest information and date – although this can also be done through online validation.

Assured and secured

Validated online

While we know that sometimes paper or PDF copies of competencies are needed, we didn’t want to lose the connection to the live data – competencies are often an ongoing process, and a one-off PDF or print-out doesn’t reflect any renewals or changes in status.

So to help maintain a live version, even with the printed copy, we’ve added a simple way for the current version any Compassly certificate to be checked.

In the top right of every certificate is a unique QR code and web link.

Scanning the code or clicking the link will take you to the live version of the certificate, which is always up to date. This means that people receiving the certificate can be assured that it’s up-to-date and still valid – including the latest expiry status and any renewals of the competency that have taken place since the certificate was originally issued.

And don’t worry if you can’t scan the QR code, you can always use the direct link included underneath.

An extra security step

This live validation also gives additional assurance that any competency certification is genuine. While it remains extremely unlikely that anyone would want to fake a certificate for competency they don’t have, sadly it could still happen.

But with online validation, even if someone were to fake a Compassly certificate they would not be able to fake the online verification at Compassly.com. This adds an extra layer of security and assurance to the certificates issued on Compassly.

Digitally signed

The PDF certificates in Compassly are also digitally signed, meaning that you can trust that they are authentic and haven’t been tampered with.

Find out more

We’ve put some more technical details on our certificate information page: www.compassly.com/certificates, and this can also be used as a quick reference for anyone receiving a certificate who is unfamiliar with Compassly.

‍