Course Completion Certificate Format: The Definitive Guide

Choosing the correct course completion certificate format can help to retain students for long. This is important for the growth of your company.

What if we say that you could create the below certificate in a few minutes and automatically assign it to your student upon course completion.

All this is possible with Learnyst, thanks to its certificate builder feature. 

E-learning is a vast ocean and comprises thousands of offshoots. One such feature is a course completion certificate. It has become an indispensable part of most e-learning courses and is arguably one of the biggest attraction factors for your course. The certificate is usually awarded to the learner on successful completion of the course.

In this blog, we will explore everything about course completion certificate format and how to use it to increase student engagement in the course.

What is a course completion certificate?

A course completion certificate is a document stating that you have studied a course and have successfully completed it within the stipulated time frame. This has been a in the e-learning sector for quite sometime now. E-learning companies like Learnyst have specially designed attractive course completion certificate templates with an aim to make student participation better and ensure that the course has a much greater reach in the market.

Why is it useful?

Offering a course completion certificate shows that you care about your students and their performances. A course completion certificate is beneficial for both the learner as well as the tutor in several ways – 

Motivation Factor

Students like to be rewarded for their work and get motivated when their work is recognized. Course completion certificates drive the motivation factor by recognizing their performance thereby reducing the dropouts from your course. You even can enable the download of a course completion certificate and allow students to share their course completion certificates on social media. This can even turn out to be an indirect marketing for your course.

Performance tracker

Distributing a course completion certificate is one of the best ways to track the performance of students in a course. In simple terms, it allows the instructor to distinguish between students who have completed a course and those who have not. This also helps you to focus on the bottlenecks of your course and help your students to complete the course on time.

Make your course verified

This is undoubtedly the most important benefit of course completion certificates. Offering certificates of completion verifies your course in the e-learning industry. Certificates act as a documented proof that portrays the value of your course. It shows the efforts put by you or your academy in the development of students. All these adds to the credibility of your course. Integrating course completion certificates from professional awarding bodies adds even more value to your course.

Career booster

As a student, receiving a course completion certificate and sharing them on social media makes your profile visible to the recruiters. It improves your chances of being in the sight of the recruiters thereby helping in your job hunting process. Make sure that your certificate has value in the market so that companies can easily recognize it and consider it for evaluating a canditate. If you are an instructor, remember this – students prefer only those certificates that improve their career prospects.

Improves branding

At the end of the day, a course completion certificate is a promotional tool that plays a vital role in branding your course or an academy. The more professional services you offer to your students, the more brand value you gain for your course.

Designing a Course Completion Certificate

By now you would have understood the value of a course completion certificate, thanks to its enormous benefit of improving your course profile in the e-learning circle. A document of such high value needs to be designed with the utmost care with a focus on the most intricate detailing. Here are some key principles to design a course completion certificate format for your students – 

Emphasis

You can issue a certificate only on the successful completion of your course. Emphasize this point in your certificate using large fonts and colors. This makes the student feel that he has completed it productively and has gained some knowledge from your course.

Contrast

In simple words, contrast is a feature of design that makes things stand out. Make your certificate as appealing as possible. It helps you to highlight a point or an element in your design. Achieved this using color, saturation, and sharpness.

Proportion

A certificate should be properly proportioned with all the text and designs formatted correctly. The text should not be either too large or too small. The proportion factor helps to achieve uniformity of design in your certificate. If you are thinking of adding a small image along with the text, it is better to follow the standard dimensions and pixel quality.

• Portrait: 905 x 1280 pixels
• Landscape: 1280 x 905 pixels

Hierarchy

Hierarchy is a key factor that helps to organize your certificate. Text should be placed in a hierarchical order so that the purpose of the certificate is easily understood by everyone. Following the below hierarchical order in certificates –

• Title
• Background design
• Watermark of your academy logo (if you have one)
• Dynamic texts like student name, course name, date of completion, and score/performance
• Signature of the awarder and stamp of your academy

The above-mentioned is the general format of any course completion certificate. With all these principles, you can design an excellent certificate and award it to your students.

Further Reading – Online Course Certificate Design

Course Completion Certificate Tools

Now you might be looking for a tool to create certificates. Most modern LMS like Learnyst provide a feature in their package that includes creating course completion certificates in a few minutes. If you still want to create certificates outside your LMS, here are some other tools that might come in handy for you to create your course completion certificate.

• MS Powerpoint: This is one of the fundamental tools that is being used for a long time for designing purposes. Powerpoint has got few templates specifically for certificates. If you are not adept in any design software, PowerPoint will always come to your rescue.
• Adobe Photoshop: Photoshop is an exclusive design tool that can be used to create any type of certificates. You can create your own design using Photoshop and there are many editing features that you might not find in Powerpoint.
• Canva: This is a free tool that falls in between Powerpoint and Photoshop. Canva has several design features but at the same time is quite user-friendly. Plenty of readily available templates makes your life easy. All you have to type in your content and download a copy.

These are just the top 3 tools that you can use. There are hundreds of online software (some of them are free) that you can use for creating a course completion certificate.

Creating course completion certificate with Learnyst

With Learnyst, you can create your courses, sell them, conduct mock tests, track performance, and many more. But apart from these mandatory features, you also have many add-ons that make the course more engaging. One such add-on is the easy building of a course completion certificate. The step-by-step procedure to create a certificate using Learnyst is given below – 

• Sign in to your Learnyst admin dashboard and click the add-on section.

• In the add-on section, click the certificate option and a dialog box pops up.

• Before creating a certificate, you have to enable the certification option for the course.

• Click on the course for which the certification is enabled. Now click on Design Certificate to start designing one.

• You can set criteria to issue a certificate to your students. For instance, certification will be awarded only to students who scored more than 80% in the course assessments.

• After setting the criteria, it is time to design the certificate.
• Click on the various templates available to quickly build your certificate.

For a more detailed step-by-step method: Designing certificates using Learnyst

Sign up with Learnyst for a 14-day trial and start designing a certificate for your course right away.