Musings From Beyond

If you are lucky enough, you are certified in some field. Very likely, you need to gather continuous professional education credit to keep the certification valid. Actually, not a bad thing in itself and it does make sense in fast-paced fields like technology.

However, if you have several certifications that you need to keep alive, then keeping track of your CPE credits can be challenging.

Enter the CPE tracker I put together. It’s free to use, obviously, but use it at your own risk.

Warning points:

• Not all CPEs are equal. Please check with your certification organisation what is acceptable as CPE and what is not
• Most organisations make a recommendation such as “in order to make re-certification achievable, please try to achieve <insert_arbitrary_number> CPE credits per year – this might differ per organisation and the CPE credit you can earn might differ as per definition
• Same as with the recommended number of CPE credits per year, the cut-off date per 12-months cycle might not always be January 1st – keep this in mind

Here is the general usage:

• Copy the 2021 and rename it to 2022, 2023, etc.
• In the A column, enter the name of the CPE you earned, e.g. “Codecademy SecDevOps in Python”
• In the B column in the same row, enter how many CPE credits this will give you, e.g. 3 (this might differ per organisation, see the warning points)
• In the certification column, drop an x if you want to use the CPE with a certification. This will automatically add those CPE credits to the amount of credit you have earned for this certification
• Most organisations require some CPE proof, like the upload of course completion certification. Once you complete the upload, you can set the UL column (stands for “upload”) to the y value from the dropdown field

Some features:

• Left top indicates how many days are left in the current year, giving you a rough indication how much you will have to hurry.
  This is based on the Settings sheet and calculated using today’s date. The general settings is using January 1st of the next calendar year but obviously you can change that e.g. to August 1st
• The CPE credit score is conditionally formatted in red until the score equals or becomes greater than the recommended CPE score per year, also in the Settings sheet
• No macros are used or were harmed while making the sheet. If you are asked to activate macros, it’s not my original sheet, be very careful.

Download:

• Zip file containing a LibreOffice Calc version and an Excel version

sha256 checksum:

shasum -a 256 CPEtrackerArchive.zip
e6370259b0be5015e85040ef5876fb5c1ee8ef94d0d323925c3f33b0e8e03629 CPEtrackerArchive.zip

Update 20220721:

Nothing like using your own tools…. I started tracking my own CPEs but also found a problem with the number of days calculation so I’ll fix that and upload the newer version. stay tuned.