Say you want to launch a company-wide compliance re-certification. All employees, same date, clean slate. Your question is simple , what's the best way to do this in Docebo without losing the history of who completed what, and when?
The answer, it turns out, depends on a distinction that isn't immediately obvious in Docebo's interface: there are two separate tools that can both handle re-certification, but they're built for fundamentally different use cases.
The Two Tools
Docebo gives you Archive Enrollment (a course-level admin action) and the Certifications & Retraining module (a platform-wide compliance automation tool). They overlap in outcome, both preserve history and allow users to re-do training, but the logic behind them is completely different.
Archive Enrollment: The Admin-Controlled Reset
Archive Enrollment is a deliberate, admin-triggered action. You go to the course → Enrollments tab → ellipsis menu → Archive enrollment, and you choose between two options: Archive and re-enroll (the user immediately re-enters the course with tracking reset) or Archive and unenroll (the user is removed entirely).
What gets preserved: the full enrollment snapshot, completion date, score, training material tracking, certificate, all frozen at the moment of archival. This data remains accessible in the Users - Courses custom report under archived enrollments, and auditors can pull it at any time.
A few important things to know before you use it at scale:
- You can only archive enrollments with a status of Enrolled, In Progress, or Completed, not users on the waiting list.
- Archived enrollments cannot be restored, the data structure changes permanently.
- When re-enrolling, the "User is enrolled in a course" notification fires automatically, so users get notified without extra setup.
Certifications & Retraining: The Automated Compliance Engine
The Certifications module is designed for ongoing, automated compliance. You configure a certification with a validity period (say, 12 months), assign it to the relevant course or learning plan, and Docebo handles the rest: when a user's certification expires, the platform archives the previous enrollment, re-enrolls the user in the renewal course, and can send proactive expiry reminders via the "Certification has expired" notification , including a direct [renew_link] so learners can act immediately.
History is preserved in the Users - Certifications custom report, where you can see both current and archived certification records, including issue dates and expiry dates.
This is the right tool when compliance is continuous and rolling , each user stays current on their own schedule, and the platform enforces renewal automatically without admin intervention.
The Key Difference , and Why It Mattered
The Certifications module renews per user, based on their individual expiry date. If one employee completed the course in January and another in June, they'll renew in January and June respectively. There's currently no native mechanism in Docebo to force everyone to recertify on the same fixed calendar date using the Certifications module alone.
If compliance is rolling, the whole company recertify together on same date, every year, as part of an annual audit cycle. Having employees on staggered renewal schedules simply didn't fit their model.
Archive Enrollment: a one-time admin action each year, timed to the company's compliance calendar, that resets everyone cleanly and triggers re-enrollment simultaneously.
Which One Is Right for You?
Here's the simple way to think about it:
- Use Archive Enrollment if your re-certification is an event, a specific date when everyone resets together, driven by an external audit cycle or company policy.
- Use Certifications & Retraining if your compliance is continuous, each user stays current on their own renewal schedule, and you want the platform to manage it automatically without admin involvement.
In practice, some organizations use both: the Certifications module to track and report compliance status year-round, and Archive Enrollment as the mechanism for the annual reset, using the module's expiry reports to identify who needs to be archived and re-enrolled.
A Note on History
One concern that often comes up: "Will we lose the previous records?" The short answer is no , but the where matters. Archived enrollment data lives in the Users - Courses custom report (filter by archived enrollments). Certification history lives in the Users - Certifications report. Make sure your reporting setup covers both, especially if you need audit trails going back multiple years.
Official documentation: Archiving course enrollments | Managing the Certifications and Retraining app