Set Recurring Dates for your repeating courses, content and compliance training

The days of just you and your spreadsheet fighting to keep everyone up-to-date with compliance and repeating courses are well and truly over! When a resource needs to be revisited every month, quarter or year, there’s no time for the manual processes of checking documents, sending reminders and keeping track of whether they’ve been ignored or not. The reality is that manually managing the process might even take longer than the course itself!

Which is exactly why we’ve added the Recurring Dates function for the courses, live classes, webinars, events and SCORM you manage in HowNow. You follow the few steps we’ve added, and in return, you’ll not only cut back on that admin time but drive continuous learning by avoiding oversights and expired certification. So, when you add these expiry dates to your content, we’ll nudge the learner to get it done in time, at the right intervals.

When you might choose to set Recurring Dates

For a lot of people, the big one is compliance training. It’s the perfect tool to ensure that people receive reminders for their mandatory courses before they expire, preventing that mad rush and manic email sending as their expiry date edges closer.

But there are also those situations where you need to remind people of key knowledge related to the company and their role. If your customer-facing employees should refresh their memory of the right terminology periodically, automation can really keep you on top of that. Or maybe we want to send our marketing team a regular reminder of the brand guidelines and tone of voice, the recurring dates feature helps you save your own voice in the process.

How to set Recurring Dates

It really is as simple as switching the ‘is this course recurring?’ toggle on and setting the required time period. You’ll notice four options in the image below: Monthly, Quarterly, Annually and Custom. Pick the relevant one and save your course. Job done!

One thing to clarify, the Recurring Date starts from when the User has completed the course, not the date which you published it. So if you publish something on 17 January but the user finishes it on 17 February, the Recurring Date starts from the latter.

What do users see when you set a Recurring Date?

A nice and shiny retake course button in the content’s header! And they’ll be given plenty of warning to click on it, with reminders sent two weeks and one day before expiry, plus a nudge one week after expiration IF they’re yet to retake the course or revisit that content.

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