Case Study: Government Accountability Office (GAO) – Custom Application for Professional Consulting Education Credits (CEC) Reporting

Client Challenge

Provide easy, user-friendly access to detailed transcript reports of completed ongoing Continuing Education Credits, over a rolling two-year certification period, by both CPE/CLE certification tracks as required for professional, certified staff to obtain or maintain their professional certification.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) implemented Cornerstone’s Learning and Performance Management suites to curate and manage the complex curriculum required for its staff. Over a rolling two-year period, GAO’s professional staff are required to complete a designated number of Continuing Professional Education (CPE) credit hours or Continuing Legal Education (CLE) credit hours to maintain their certifications. Failure to maintain the required credits results in a restriction on the tasks that can be performed. GAO needed the ability for individual users, their managers, and administrators to monitor progress towards CPE/CLE requirements.

Previously, GAO provided this functionality to its staff through a two-step process. First, users would complete their training in the Cornerstone LMS. Next, they separately accessed a third-party application solution to create transcripts reflecting course completions with CPE/CLE in GAO’s preferred custom reporting format. Although this solution worked, users and management found jumping in and out of the two systems cumbersome. Navigation, although functional, was inconvenient, time consuming, and clunky. Although the transcripts were available, the inefficiency greatly impacted the overall user experience. GAO wanted a more-convenient, easier process for managing Continuing Education Credits, currently and historically, directly within the Cornerstone platform to eliminate logging into another system.
GAO hoped their new LMS could provide the extensive transcript reporting capabilities they needed, to include the capability for both the individual user and for management staff to track their staff’s Continuing Education progress.

Although Cornerstone’s reporting solutions are very adept, in-depth analysis revealed two product limitations within the Cornerstone system that impacted the ability to produce the complex, robust transcript reporting GAO needed. The key gaps eSkillz consultants identified were centered around the calculation logistics and creating reports with custom formats.

The big challenge then became: How can we create a better experience for our end users to access their transcripts easily through our new Cornerstone solution using the custom transcript format our users are accustomed to?

Providing ongoing continual education courses and producing a transcript that reflected course completions by individual and by department, across the required two-year period for multiple certification tracks accessible on-demand within multiple platforms, quickly began to appear not possible.
ANSWER: eSkillz – A trusted partner known for its best-in-industry consultative expertise and best practices.

Working closely with GAO, eSkillz consultants provided end-to-end care for GAO’s reporting needs by:

• • • Creating a custom application performing critical hierarchical calculations that accurately and easily displays transcripts detailing a user’s progress or a department’s progress with current and historical views in GAO’s custom transcript format.
    • Increased user interactivity with transcript data that provides filtering by individual, by department, current and historical completions, by each two-year certification period and by each certification track
    • Streamlined accessibility by embedding the transcript reporting into the LMS, and incorporating auto-fitting programming, users can easily view transcripts and extract pdfs in real time within one system across any device.

eSkillz Solution

After a successful, long-standing partnership with GAO, GAO looked to eSkillz Technical Services team to create a custom solution that could bridge the reporting technical gaps. eSkillz wanted to enhance the end-user experience by allowing users to complete training and view their progress within a single system in the custom report format users were already accustomed to. Creating the right solution required a multi-layer approach.

Complex Transcript Reporting: Achieving the transcription calculations and reporting was no easy task. Higher-level and sub-categorical programming logic needed to be completed outside of Cornerstone to ensure transcript accuracy. eSkillz consultants first learned how the continuing education data needed to display in the transcript. From there, custom rules were built and programmed to track completed courses against the CPE or CLE certification track, as well as by date to confirm course completion occurred within the required rolling two-year period to maintain one’s certification. All of these calculations are externally processed nightly through the eSkillz custom application to ensure users and management have daily access to the most current course completion data.

Single System via web-based custom CSOD page: eSkillz achieved streamlining the user experience by allowing the user to complete training and see their progress within the LMS. This next phase of our solution was instrumental because users and management could now interface with only one system and can easily display course progress with CPE/CLE data in multiple ways. The result – increased user interactivity with the LMS and increased efficiency since they complete their training and access their progress in a single system.

eSkillz accomplished this by building a custom CSOD page within the LMS that imports and displays the course completion data on a daily basis calculated by our custom application. eSkillz programmed a CSOD custom dashboard which allows immense reporting flexibility in the following ways:

• • • Current and Historical Periods: Through a simple click, course completions for the current two-year certification period are seen. With another simple click, the dashboard displays links to access past course completions within each previous two-year certification period.
    • Transcripts by User: Users can view both their transcript for the current reporting period along with past reporting periods.
    • Transcripts by Team, Department or Division: Since the custom dashboard view varies depending on the user’s role, managers can view both their personal course completions and their staff course completions. The manager’s dashboard displays a listing of all their staff members by team, department and/or division with aggregated course completions by each category. A simple click on each staff member’s name then leads a manager into detailed current transcripts of the chosen staff member with the option to view their past transcripts.
    • Transcripts By Multiple Tracks: GAO staff completing courses in both the CPE and CLE certifications tracks can see their progress by track for each two-year certification period for each track. Custom programming ensures each certification track is calculated within the correct two-year periods since the two-year period for each track is offset by one year.
    • On-demand, current data: Our eSkillz solution eliminated viewing static, outdated report runs based on old, incomplete data. Users and management can navigate data in real-time based on the daily upload processed by the eSkillz custom application.

Custom Transcript format: Since Cornerstone’s reporting solution could not deliver reporting in a custom format, GAO was willing to forgo their preferred custom transcript template if eSkillz could achieve the proper reporting they needed. However, our eSkillz consultants once again exceeded GAO’s expectations by also providing the robust reporting in GAO’s custom transcript format within all the custom dashboard views.

Mobile Responsive Solution: Again, eSkillz consultants exceeded GAO’s expectations by allowing users to access their data at any time, on any device, through any browser. We eliminated the inconvenience of their previous solution where users had to manually adjust, magnify or scroll the previous static image. By incorporating auto-fitting technology, our solution auto-adjusts the display to the user’s chosen device.

Data Mobility: Since the eSkillz solution is driven from the user’s individual progress, users find they can still access their transcripts and completions even after changing job roles within GAO’s organization. Users can directly download their transcripts in real-time or extract .pdfs on demand when needed.

Increased User Awareness & Adoption: eSkillz custom solution delivers on-demand data the way a user wants to see it, when they want to see it, and on the device of their choice. Our solution expands and changes with the user as their skills, course completions and career progress.

Results

The eSkillz custom dashboard application now allows GAO’s certified professionals to maintain current certifications by completing courses and viewing progress in one system.

By working side by side with GAO, our eSkillz Technical Services team created a custom-built application that met all of GAO’s needs and offered them customized functionality within Cornerstone which enhanced the out of box solution.

The custom-built solution eSkillz successfully created proved to deliver the functionality and ease-of-use within the Cornerstone Learning module GAO wanted. Now, users and managers can efficiently track CPE/CLE course completions with a few simple clicks within one system. Course completions can be viewed in the current two-year certification track along with past certification tracks by individual user or by all users within a department. Transcripts detailing outstanding courses and progress required to maintain staff certifications is also quickly extrapolated to avoid certifications lapsing.

The eSkillz custom dashboard application now allows GAO’s certified professionals to maintain current certifications while completing necessary tasks without restriction and penalty to the clientele they serve.

The following screenshots spotlight GAO’s new eSkillz custom dashboard in Cornerstone and the reports:

The following are examples of the reports generated when a user clicks the Download” button on the dashboard.

Now users can easily produce this report in a pdf format to submit to certification agencies or fellow staff members reflecting their progress and current certifications on file.

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