Applying for a certification on someone’s behalf takes a member or organization through the same eligibility checks, application form, and payment they would use in the Portal, without asking them to sign in.
When to Use This
Use this task when a member calls in, an employer wants to apply for its organization, or you want to enter the application for someone. The application uses the applicant’s eligibility rules, so you see only the processes and options that person or organization can use right now.
If you need to record an application directly, such as certification history from before you used Rhythm, use Search for and Manage an Application instead. That option lets you create an application by hand without going through eligibility, payment, or the configured form.
Certifications works best when applicants complete eligibility first and apply second. Usually, someone takes the required course or meets the criteria, then applies after every condition is already met. A certification application does not include a reviewer-based pre-approval step the way some other Rhythm applications do, so you cannot route the application to a reviewer before the applicant continues. If you need that kind of gate, such as approving someone before they register for the required course, collect the first request in an application that supports reviewers, such as Awards. Then send approved people to Certifications to apply or register after you clear them.
Prerequisites
- You need permission to process applications.
- Your account must have Certifications settings configured. If it does not, Rhythm stops and tells you that Certifications has not been configured.
- The contact or organization you’re applying for must be eligible for at least one process in the program you choose.
Start an Application
- Go to Certifications › Applications and select Start New Application.
- Choose the contact or organization you’re applying for.
- Choose the Program.
- Select Start Application.
Rhythm remembers the last program you chose in this browser and offers it again the next time you start an application, including on the manual create-application form. If you switch between programs often, double-check the program before you continue. A draft application stays tied to the record you opened it for, so selecting a different organization or contact elsewhere in the console does not move the open draft to that record.
Result
Rhythm opens the application process for the applicant and program you chose.
Choose the Applicant and Process
If the application could be for more than one applicant, such as the contact, their organization, or one of several organizations they can act for, Rhythm asks who the application is for and shows a Continue button. If there is only one possible applicant, Rhythm skips this question.
Rhythm then shows only the processes this applicant is eligible for right now. Eligibility usually depends on:
- Whether the process is active, and whether it is limited to organization types that do not match the applicant’s organization.
- Whether the applicant already has an open application in this program. If a Missing Requirements or Pending Approval application already exists, Rhythm does not offer another process.
- The applicant’s existing certification in the program, if they have one. Someone with no certification sees only first-certification processes. Someone with an active certification sees renewal processes, within the renewal window, or transfer processes. Someone with a suspended certification sees no processes. Someone whose certification lapsed and was terminated sees reinstatement processes, within the reinstatement period, or new-certification processes. Sometimes reinstatement and new-certification processes appear together, so help the applicant confirm which one they mean. Reapplying instead of reinstating can mean redoing requirements they had already met.
- Any eligibility criteria or grandfather restrictions your program’s setup defines for the process. For an organization application, Rhythm checks eligibility against the organization itself, not the contact submitting it. A contact-level custom field will not make an organization process available based on the submitting contact’s answers. Eligibility can also depend on something outside Certifications, such as an active membership. If no process appears even though the certification conditions look right, check for a prerequisite like that before assuming the setup is wrong. If you are building eligibility with Advanced Rules & Logic, it may not expose every certification-specific field you expect, which can require a different rule approach.
If Rhythm does not offer any processes, review the applicant’s certification status and existing applications in the program before assuming something is wrong.
Every certification application, including one filed for an organization, is tied to a contact. You cannot create or keep an application as an organization-only record without one.
Process selection happens as soon as you enter a program, using the contact and profile information already on file at that moment. Changing a related contact custom field later on the certification application form does not move the applicant to a different process. If a field needs to control routing, make sure it is already set on the contact or profile before the applicant starts. You can require it on that earlier form, or have the member update it and then begin the application. If only certain members should be able to start an application, but other contacts should help complete it afterward, have the eligible members start the application. Then use contact role settings to let the other contacts continue updating it after it is started.
Fill In the Application
Your administrator designs the application form. It can include regular fields, your account’s custom fields, and these certification-specific sections when the process places them on a page:
- Courses and exams. Choose an offering for each required course or exam.
- Credits. Review progress toward each credit requirement, including how many credits the applicant has and how many more they need.
- References. Enter a referee’s first name, last name, and email for each required reference. You cannot move past the page until every reference slot is complete.
- Review. Review a read-only summary of the application before checkout.
- Embedded membership application. Join or renew membership in the same checkout when the form includes it. This works only when the certification application and membership action use compatible owner types. For example, selecting an organization membership process from an individual’s certification application can fail to open the membership step because the certification application belongs to a contact, not an organization. An earlier version of this combined checkout could also fail to initialize with an owner-type error when starting membership renewal alongside a certification application. That issue has since been addressed.
Collect the applicant’s name, email, and organization details on the Contact Form within the process instead of adding those fields directly to the certification application form. If a contact’s organization needs to change, make that change through the contact update process instead of this application. Sections you have seen in training materials, such as education or employment history, may be custom fields configured for that example rather than standard sections every account has. Confirm what your own form includes before assuming a section is built in. If a Yes/No custom field on the form was populated by an import, check for blank values. An imported blank can behave unexpectedly, so normalize existing blanks to a clear default and set that default for new applications too. If your form has multiple pages, keep the Submit transition off every page before the last one. A Submit transition on an earlier page lets an applicant submit the application before finishing the rest of the form. If applicants need to see important instructions before checkout, and you cannot customize the checkout page itself, add a text box to the application form instead.
Tip
Rhythm pre-fills the application’s custom fields from the applicant’s certification profile and, when available, from their most recent application in this program. Values from the most recent application take priority over the profile. If the applicant already holds a certification in this program, that certification’s custom field values fill any application fields the profile and last application did not already answer. Prefill from a member’s previous applications submitted in Rhythm works this way. Certification history imported into Rhythm has produced varied carry-forward results, so confirm imported values carried forward the way you expect before relying on them.
If the process turns off prefilling from the profile and last application, the form starts empty instead.
Complete Payment
- Once you’ve filled in every page, continue to checkout.
- Review the order, which includes the application fee and a fee for each course or exam offering you chose.
- Collect payment and confirm the order.
Result
Rhythm saves the application and links it to the paid order. After the order finishes processing, Rhythm emails the applicant a confirmation that their application was received, unless the process has this notice turned off or the order suppresses customer emails. If the application included course or exam registrations, Rhythm also sends a separate confirmation for each registration.
Both the original application form and any renewal form need the Collect Order Details and Confirm Order Details components for checkout to process. A renewal form that is missing either component can fail to process the application. A form used only to update an already-submitted application is usually separate from the original submission flow. Leave Collect Order Details out of that update form, since that path is not meant to collect a new payment.
Warning
Right after payment completes, Rhythm may still be writing the application record in the background. If you see the message "We're still writing the application information to the database... try again in a few seconds," wait a moment and reopen the application from Certifications › Applications instead of repeating the checkout.
Warning
A required signature field can occasionally block progress on an early page of a certification form. If that happens, process the certification for the applicant directly instead of using the blocked self-service flow, or remove the signature component from the form until the issue is resolved. You can also complete a stuck Portal registration on the applicant’s behalf by impersonating their contact. If the form includes a Save transition, the applicant can save their progress instead, and you can finish the final processing step for them later.
If checkout fails with a payment error that looks related to the card network rather than Rhythm, have the applicant retry the payment. If it happens again, ask them to contact their card issuer because some payment errors start there rather than in Rhythm. If checkout fails for one user and you cannot reproduce the problem, try again before assuming it is a bug. On rare occasions, a page transition error has blocked completion of a specific certification program’s application. In isolated cases, a timeout during order processing has created the certification application record without creating its payment record or a usable order and transaction. If the applicant’s original submission already charged successfully and a retry could create a duplicate charge, create the application manually in the console instead of asking them to submit again. Before treating a missing payment step as a product bug, confirm that the payment collection component is still on the intended page of the application form. If someone needs to pay in a different currency, change the currency before opening or resuming a draft renewal or recertification application, not from inside an existing draft.
If you need to update the contact on an existing certification application, use a query and mass update instead of reassigning the applicant by hand. A manual change can fail to carry forward the application’s originally submitted required-field answers, while mass update preserves them. The same bulk-update approach works when you need to correct many affected applications at once. Match on the (Application) ID field, not (Application) Certification ID, since (Application) Certification ID causes the update to report the application as not found.
If a certification application form will not load for one specific user and you cannot reproduce the problem yourself, start by ruling out that person’s setup. Ask them to try without a VPN and on a different device before escalating further. If you are troubleshooting what an applicant sees for a draft application, and the related new-certification process has been made inactive, reactivate it temporarily so you can see what they see. An inactive process configuration can otherwise get in the way of that troubleshooting.
If your account uses a Submissions review space for certification review, only applications that are pending approval sync there. Make sure review setup is configured, and use its Populate Submission Space option if you need to bring existing pending applications into it.
Related Reading
After the application is submitted, review it and move it forward at Search for and Manage an Application. If a required credit is single-use and was not counted automatically, see Apply Credits to an Application. When the application is approved, see Activate an Application Into a Certification to turn it into a certification. For an overview of which processes an applicant can use and why, see Which Application Processes You Can Use. To find the right contact before you start, see Search for and Pick a Contact.