As a career and technical education (CTE) administrator, one of the greatest metrics of your learners’ success is their ability to earn industry-based certifications. Industry-based certifications verify an earner’s knowledge and skills in a particular field and help them stand out from their peers in a competitive job market.
Tracking and reporting on the number of students who earn a certification is a critical measure of a CTE program’s effectiveness and is often a key factor in a school’s ability to receive and maintain state and federal CTE funding. However, many schools and programs don’t have an effective method for measuring long-term success in preparing learners for these valuable credentials.
To help administrators and teachers better track student performance in earning CTE certifications, Eduthings provides robust data reporting features that capture and measure certification rates, demographic information, and other vital metrics unique to CTE programs.
But how exactly does Eduthings track this information, and how does capturing this information help your CTE program plan for the future?
In this article, we’ll review the importance of industry-based certifications in measuring the success of a CTE program. You'll also discover how Eduthings provides a custom solution to collect and report this information to help your program plan for long-term success.
Why Are Industry Certifications Important to CTE Program Success?
Before taking a closer look at how Eduthings tracks industry certifications for CTE programs, it’s important to quickly review why these credentials have become such an important part of today’s CTE programs.
Industry-based certifications are a unique measurement of a learner’s qualifications in a specific field. Passing a certification test demonstrates that a person has specific skills and competencies that are valued or even unique to a specific career pathway. Earning a certification identifies someone as career-ready right out of a CTE program and increases the likelihood of being hired.
Because industry certifications are so valuable, they’ve been recognized as an important measure of the success not only of CTE graduates, but the programs that prepared them for their careers. Demonstrating a pattern of students earning certifications and landing desirable employment opportunities helps students, parents, and community and industry partners be confident that a program is achieving its goal to prepare qualified graduates for the workforce.
Just as importantly, industry certification rates are increasingly an essential statistic when reporting CTE program performance to state and federal education agencies. Departments of Education are asking schools to prove a return on their investment of government money and grants by requiring evidence that the funding has helped students earn certifications on the way to receiving competitive job offers.
In some circumstances, your state could offer a specific grant that provides added funding beyond that offered by Perkins V. Demonstrating a high number of students earning industry-based certifications is often a key factor in unlocking this additional funding.
Ultimately, when you’re able to prove your program’s success through certifications, you’ll be able to maintain your funding, attract new students, and expand opportunities through new CTE pathways and community partnerships that enhance the learning experience.
What Certification Data Am I Required to Report?
While data reporting requirements can vary from state to state, individual CTE programs and districts are increasingly compelled to report on the performance of their learners on industry-sponsored certifications.
Specifically, schools are required to report on:
- The number of students who have earned certifications
- The number of certification attempts
These basic numbers are used to calculate your certification rate: the percentage of individuals who take a certification exam and successfully pass the assessment.
This information, when combined with other key details, such as the number of completers and concentrators, your school’s enrollment, and demographic information, helps form a picture of your program and how well it’s performing.
Keep in mind that while your state may only require you to report a few statistics related to your CTE students, tracking a wider variety of data can tell a more complete story—and better set you and your program up for future success.
How Does Eduthings Track CTE Certification Data?
Eduthings tracks CTE certification data by integrating with your school’s student information systems (SIS) to track vital statistics in a single space.
Through this integration, Eduthings captures CTE program data through a digital connection that allows educators to simplify the data entry process. Instructors and administrators only need to input information once and it will be saved and imported into the Eduthings data management system.
Once you’ve integrated your information systems with Eduthings, your data is updated automatically through a nightly syncing process. This ensures everyone in your program has an accurate and complete record of your CTE certification data.
Finally, Eduthings enables you to analyze your data through certification-specific reports that help you pinpoint your learners’ performance on specific industry certifications as well as the overall results of your certification initiatives.
How Does Eduthings Simplify Certification Data Management?
Dealing with a large amount of CTE data can be challenging. Eduthings simplifies data collection and management through an intuitive system that saves teachers time and improves accuracy.
Educators can enter certification results by class roster instead of entering data on individual student profiles, making the reporting process much easier. You’ll be able to see directly from the class roster page who in your classes have passed a certification. This helps paint a picture of the overall success of each class in becoming certified.
You’re also able to view the number of exam attempts each student has taken so you can easily calculate your return on investment based on the overall cost of certification exam vouchers.
Because Eduthings integrates with your student information systems (SIS) and updates automatically, you can be confident that you always have the most up-to-date record of student certification performance.
From here, it is easy to create certification reports based on a wide range of data filters to find data correlations that can help you improve your program and certify as many learners as possible.
Which Types of Certification Reports Are Available in Eduthings?
Since Eduthings is designed specifically for CTE, certification-related reports are built into the data management system. You can easily create a report for each of your industry certifications, giving you a bird’s-eye view of your students’ success when working toward a specific credential.
However, Eduthings allows you to go beyond basic information such as pass rates to better understand of who your learners are and where they are finding success in earning industry-based certifications.
Administrators and teachers can create certification reports with a variety of filters, allowing them to analyze and understand certification results from several different vantage points. Eduthings also includes the ability to view multiple filters at the same time, helping educators pinpoint specific performance data in a customized report.
Some examples of the types of filters available include:
- Grade Level
- Demographic
- Participant, Concentrator, or Completer Status
- Teacher
- School Campus
You can use these filters to create nuanced reports to help you better answer key questions to plan for your program's future.
For instance, you could run a report that looks only at 12th grade students to see who is graduating with an industry credential. You can further refine this report with a demographic filter to see if the number of students who become certified equitably represents the demographic makeup of your campus and district.
Finally, administrators at the district level can create reports by school campus and teacher. This makes it easy to quickly recognize top-performing educators and identify teachers or schools that could use additional support in improving pass rates.
What Is the Value of Eduthings Certification Reports?
When integrated into a CTE program, Eduthings empowers data management for administrators and teachers.
The multitude of certification reports available through the Eduthings system can help you build a transformative understanding of your CTE program’s certification efforts, align with reporting requirements, and prepare for the future.
Most data management tools offer simple reports, such as the outcome of a certification test. This might give you just enough information to report to your state education agency, but hardly offers a complete picture of how specific pathways, classes, and CTE experiences prepare learners for certification success.
With Eduthings, you can create robust certification reports with many filters to construct a complex knowledge of your program’s CTE certification results so you can optimize your efforts over time.
Moreover, Eduthings allows districts to track multiple certifications for each student. While some data management tools only track the final result of a single certification, Eduthings tracks every attempt for each certification a learner pursues. This results in more complete data that fully represents the return on investment for each certification.
Finally, Eduthings simplifies and customizes data entry depending on your district’s preferences. This can give you the flexibility to allow teachers, school officials, or district CTE staff to enter certification data. Since this data is updated automatically in Eduthings, you can save time and distribute data entry tasks while remaining confident that your information is accurate and secure.
Discover How Eduthings Can Track Your Certification Rates
Performance on industry-based certifications is one of the most powerful indicators of the success of your CTE program. A high certification rate is indicative of a successful program, proving the value of your work to everyone from state education agencies to community partners to students and their families. A proven record of accomplishment can lead to continued and increased funding opportunities, allowing you to expand your CTE offerings and provide even more options for the next generation of learners.
In this article, you’ve learned how Eduthings is specially designed to track CTE certification rates and other vital statistics, simplifying data collection and making the process of complying with state regulations straightforward. When you integrate Eduthings with your school’s student information systems (SIS), you’re able to confidently track these essential figures and set your program up for future success.
But how will you know that Eduthings will work in your district’s particular situation?
The best way to see how Eduthings can benefit your program is to sign up for a personalized demo. When you sign up, our team will provide you with a customized demonstration of Eduthings so you can see how it will integrate with your existing technology systems and track information essential to your program.
Visit the Eduthings home page to sign up today:
