Credential Registry Guidance · Publishing
Publishing Registry Data
There are several ways to get your organization's data into the Credential Registry, from filling in a form to having your own system publish automatically. You don't need to be technical or know every option to get started. You just need an idea of what you want to publish and where that information lives today.
Ways to publish
Most organizations pick one method based on where their data already lives, not on how technical they are. The guidance pages linked below cover each method step by step.
| Method | Best for | What you'll need | Technical level |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bulk Upload | Many records that are already in a spreadsheet, or in an export from your student information system (SIS) or learning management system (LMS) | Comfort with Excel or Google Sheets (see the tips) | Medium |
| Manual Entry | A handful of records, or fixing one record | A web browser and the record's details | Low |
| Registry Assistant API | Having your own system publish and update records automatically | A developer and an API key | Advanced |
| Badge Publisher | Badges you already issue through Credly, Parchment, or JSON | Access to your badge platform | Low |
| xTRA | Courses, programs, or competency frameworks described on your public website | Your web page addresses, and time to review the results | Low |
| Competency editor | Competency frameworks and collections (typed in, uploaded as a spreadsheet, or pasted in) | Your list of competencies | Low to Medium |
| Pathway Builder | Laying out a route from published credentials and courses to a job | The records in the pathway, already published | Low |
Every method except the API ends the same way: you approve your records in the Publisher before they're published. With the API, your own system publishes them directly.
Rules of thumb
- Lots of records, or not sure? Bulk upload. It isn't just for small batches, and a large number of records on its own isn't a reason to use the API. If you have a spreadsheet or a report you can run, it's the same file next time, so updates are quick too. See the spreadsheet tips below.
- Few records that rarely change? Manual entry. You'll be done in an afternoon.
- Records change often, and you have a developer? That's when the Registry Assistant API makes sense: your own system keeps the Registry up to date, so nobody has to re-upload.
- Pick one home for each record. Bulk uploads match rows to existing records by External Identifier, so a later upload replaces what's there, including any changes made by hand in between. Make edits in the same place every time.
What do you want to publish?
Pick the card that sounds most like what you have. Each one goes to the page or tool built for it. Most organizations start with one of the first three.
Most common
Credentials, like certificates, degrees, licenses, or certifications
For: registrars, program staff, certification and licensing bodies.
Publish the credential's name, type, description, and webpage, then add more when you're ready.
Digital badges you already issue
For: anyone issuing badges through Credly, Parchment, or another platform that exports badge data as JSON.
The Badge Publisher pulls your badge data in, so you review and publish instead of retyping.
Courses or programs
For: colleges, training providers, bootcamps, apprenticeship sponsors.
Publish courses, programs, or other learning opportunities, whether or not they lead to a credential.
Course or program details that are already on your website
For: organizations that don't have a spreadsheet or system export to start from, or don't have time to build one.
xTRA reads your public web pages and turns them into bulk upload files, which can save a lot of time. You review everything before it's published.
Going further
The skills or competencies behind your credentials and courses
For: program designers, faculty, industry associations, standards bodies.
Publish them as a competency framework or a competency collection.
A path from learning to a job
For: states, systems, and providers mapping career pathways.
Pathway Builder puts published credentials and courses in order, leading to a job. Only need to show that one credential builds on another? Connect the records directly instead.
Credit people can get for what they've already learned
For: registrars, articulation and transfer staff, credit recommendation services.
Publish transfer values, so people can see what their past learning is worth before they enroll.
Outcomes, like employment and earnings
For: institutional research, state agencies, workforce boards.
Publish outcome data and connect it to the credentials or programs it describes.
Your approvals or accreditations of other organizations' programs
For: accreditors, state approving agencies, quality assurance bodies.
Publish quality assurance actions: who approved what, under which criteria, and when.
Whatever a funder or program says you have to publish
For: anyone responding to Workforce Pell, WIOA ETPL, Perkins V, or a similar requirement.
Start with your program's own guidance, then come back here for the how-to.
Something else?
The Registry also holds assessments, jobs, occupations, support services, rubrics, and more. Each one has a bulk upload template in the Publisher, under Add New/Bulk Upload. See the full list of data types, or email publishing@credentialengine.org and tell us what you're trying to publish.
What order to publish in
Publish the things being pointed to first
Start with the records other records point to, then work up. It isn't a rule, but it's so much easier and less work.
Here's why: when the record you're pointing to already exists, you can make the connection the first time you publish. Every time a published record is edited, it has to be approved and published again. Publishing in a different order still works, it just means extra rounds of editing, re-approving, and re-publishing.
-
Just credentials, or just courses Most publishers
Nothing to line up. Publish them in any order.
-
Credentials plus the competencies they require
Competencies→CredentialsPublish the framework or collection first, then point each credential to it.
-
Credentials, the courses that lead to them, and the competencies taught
Competencies→Courses or programs→CredentialsEach layer points down to the one before it: courses point to the competencies they teach, and credentials point to the courses they require.
-
The deep end: skills, competencies, courses, and credentials
Skills→Competencies→Courses→CredentialsIndividual skills first, then the competencies built from them, then courses, then credentials. Very few organizations need all four layers.
Do your credentials or courses build on each other?
Connect the records to each other, like a certificate that counts toward a degree. That alone is valuable: anyone looking at either record can see how they fit together. See how to connect related data.
A pathway goes a step further. It lays out the route from learning to a job, with each step in order. If that's what you want to show, publish each step first, then put them together in Pathway Builder.
If one of the steps is a credential issued as a badge, the Badge Publisher can publish it.
Decide what optional data to publish
Required fields get a record published. Optional fields are what make it useful to the people looking at it: how long it takes, what it costs, what jobs it leads to. There are a lot of them, and nobody publishes all of them. Start with the ones that matter most for your goal. The steps below help you choose them and find where the information lives.
1Start with who will use the data
Before talking about fields, agree on who the data is for and what they're trying to find out. A few examples:
- A career changer wants to know how long will this take, and what will it cost?
- An advisor wants to know does this count toward anything else?
- An employer wants to know what can someone with this credential actually do?
Each question points to a short list of fields. Not sure what your goal is yet? Start with your goal.
2Find the people and systems that have the information
The information is usually spread across a few people, offices, and systems. Titles vary between a college, a certification body, a training provider, and a state agency, but the roles look something like this. Bring them in early, even just for one conversation.
| Who or where | What they usually have |
|---|---|
| Whoever keeps your official list of offerings | Official names, descriptions, codes, credit, prerequisites |
| Program, curriculum, or exam owners | Competencies and learning outcomes, how long it takes, how it's delivered or assessed |
| Your website, and whoever keeps it current | The webpage for each credential or program, and often descriptions, costs, and keywords too |
| Finance, billing, or financial aid | Costs, fees, financial assistance |
| Employer partners, advisory boards, or career services | Related jobs, occupations, and industries |
| Research, data, or reporting staff | Completion, employment, and earnings outcomes |
| Compliance, accreditation, or licensing staff | Accreditors, approvals, licensing bodies, renewal rules |
| Articulation agreements, and whoever manages transfer or credit for prior learning | What counts toward what, and how much credit it's worth |
| Grants staff | Any fields a funder requires |
| Your systems: student, learning, training, certification, or licensing records | Exports for bulk upload, or a connection for the API. IT or the system's owner can pull them. |
3Make a short list, and give each field an owner
Start from the recommended fields on the optional data pages for credentials or learning opportunities, then add the fields that answer your users' questions. For each field, write down:
- Where it lives today (the catalog, the website, a system, someone's spreadsheet).
- Who owns it, and who will tell you when it changes.
- How often it changes (every term or cycle, every year, almost never).
If no one can keep a field current, leave it out for now. Out-of-date data is worse than missing data, and your organization has agreed to keep its records current under the Data Currency Policy.
4Try a few records, then look at them together
Publish two or three records first. Then look them up on Credential Finder with your stakeholders and ask: would this answer our users' questions? Adjust, then publish the rest.
You don't have to get it all in on day one. Publishing the required fields now and adding more later is normal.
Questions to bring to the meeting
- Who do we want to find this, and what do they need to know before they decide?
- What do people ask us about most often (cost, time, credit, jobs)?
- Is anyone requiring us to publish certain data, like a funder or state agency?
- Which of this information is already public on our website?
- Who will tell us when something changes, and how?
The optional data pages also have an AI prompt helper: describe what you're publishing and who it's for, and an AI tool suggests fields from the page's own list. It's a good way to get a first draft of your short list before the meeting.
Tips for working in Excel and Google Sheets
Bulk upload means a spreadsheet, and a few habits save a lot of cleanup later.
Quick tips
- Work in a regular spreadsheet file, and save a .csv copy only to upload. A .csv keeps just one tab and no formulas, so keep your working copy as .xlsx or a Google Sheet.
- Set code columns to Text before you paste. Spreadsheets like to "help": a course code like 0451 loses its leading zero, and one like 3-12 turns into a date.
- Clean up text copied from websites or documents. It often brings extra spaces or invisible characters along, which can cause errors when you upload.
- Keep running lists of what you've published, one for each kind of record, with your own identifier and its CTID. See more on running lists below.
Long lists of CTIDs
Some bulk upload columns take several values in one cell, separated by a pipe character (|). When those values are CTIDs, the cell can get very long. Teaches Competencies on a course that covers 40 competencies is 40 CTIDs in one cell. Typing them by hand is slow and easy to get wrong. Instead, keep your CTIDs where you can copy them, or where a lookup formula like VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP can pull them in for you.
What it looks like
Most people already have the connections as a list: one row for each competency a course teaches. The upload needs one cell per course instead.
What you have: a list
| Course | Competency it teaches (CTID) |
|---|---|
| BUS-101 | ce-7a1f… |
| BUS-101 | ce-0c93… |
| BUS-101 | ce-5e2d… |
| BUS-210 | ce-0c93… |
What the upload needs
| Course | Teaches Competencies |
|---|---|
| BUS-101 | ce-7a1f…|ce-0c93…|ce-5e2d… |
| BUS-210 | ce-0c93… |
A full CTID is ce- followed by 36 letters, numbers, and dashes, like ce-7a1f3b2c-0d4e-4f5a-8b6c-9d0e1f2a3b4c. They're shortened above to fit.
BUS-101 is listed three times because it teaches three competencies. It's still one course with one CTID of its own. The CTIDs in the list belong to the competencies, and a course keeps the same CTID unless it changes in a fundamental way.
Keep running lists of what you've published
You can only point to records that are already published, so their CTIDs already exist. The easiest way to have them on hand is a running list: one row for everything you publish, with your own identifier for it and the CTID it was published under. Your identifier is whatever you already use to tell records apart, like an External Identifier, a course code, or a URI for a skill.
A few habits make the lists easy to keep up:
- Keep one list for each kind of record. If you publish competencies, courses, and credentials, that's three lists (or three tabs). Each one is a clean lookup for the records that point to it.
- Use the same column headers as your bulk upload template. Then, after each upload, paste the new rows straight from the .csv you uploaded. There's nothing to retype or rearrange.
- Make sure the CTID comes along. If your upload file has a CTID column, it's already there. If not, add the CTIDs from the Publisher's downloads.
Example: a competencies list (two of its columns)
| Your identifier | CTID |
|---|---|
| https://example.edu/skills/budgeting | ce-7a1f… |
| https://example.edu/skills/forecasting | ce-0c93… |
| https://example.edu/skills/reporting | ce-5e2d… |
Running lists do two jobs:
- They show what's new. Before your next upload, you can tell which records you've already published and which ones you haven't.
- They make lookups easy. When you build a connections list, you can work with the identifiers you already know, then match each one to its CTID from your list instead of hunting for it.
Copy and paste CTIDs, never retype them. If you published by bulk upload, paste them straight from the file you uploaded. Otherwise, paste them from the Publisher's downloads (Summary and Downloads > Organization Summary and Downloads) or, for competencies, from your framework or collection's export. One wrong character breaks the connection.
Add to your lists every time you publish. Records added or changed by hand in the Publisher won't be in your upload files, so they're easy to miss. That's one more reason to make changes the same way every time.
No lists yet? Start them from the Publisher's downloads or your framework's export.
Not sure where to start, or stuck? Email the Publishing team at publishing@credentialengine.org. Tell us what you want to publish and where the information lives today.