Welcome to Merit’s Blog.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of men and women leave the U.S. military service and re-enter civilian life. Unfortunately, many of these skilled individuals struggle to find employment in roles that are commensurate with the level of expertise and competence that they have acquired, and addressing this gap is something that I have become extremely passionate about. 

We’re proud to announce that the Virginia Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA Virginia) is transforming the way they issue continuing education and training units offered through their chapter by going digital with Merit, a free online credentialing platform. Virginia Architects will now be able to manage their professional Architect license from the VA Department of Professional and Occupational Regulations (DPOR) and their continuing education from AIA Virginia all on the same digital platform.

New platform will cut through red tape, track worker achievements, increase trust in workforce

Today, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam announced that Virginia’s Department of Professional and Occupational Regulation (DPOR) is streamlining individual professional licensing by partnering with digital credentialing service Merit® to drive innovation, digital transformation, and efficiency for hundreds of thousands of occupational license holders in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Merit’s technology will enable DPOR to issue digital licenses, giving every licensed professional the ability to carry their up-to-date credentials anywhere they go.

Do you issue certificates, licenses, or credentials? More importantly, do you send them in bulk? 

If your answer is yes, then you know how difficult it is to send credentials one-by-one, even if you do it digitally. That’s why Merit created a tool for this very case – spreadsheet upload, our bulk upload tool. And hey, we’ve just made some powerful improvements to make the whole process even easier!

How does this feature work? 

In a nutshell, the upload spreadsheet tool enables you to send dozens (or even thousands) of merits at once. 

All you have to do is follow these basic steps: 

1. Create a merit template: This template represents the credential, license, or certificate that you need to send.
2. Upload a merit template spreadsheet to Merit: This spreadsheet should include the recipient’s name, merit title, and other important fields for your credential.
3. Send your merits: Once your spreadsheet is fully uploaded, click Send to share them with your recipients! 

What improvements have been added? 

Merit has just made some helpful updates to the upload spreadsheet tool to make your life easier!

• The feature now offers a built-in guide that walks you through each step of the process.
• You can now download a specific spreadsheet that corresponds with the merit template you want to send so there's no need to manually add fields to your spreadsheet.
• You can also map your merit fields to any column in your spreadsheet, even if they don’t match or aren’t in the same order.
• In cases where your spreadsheet has errors, you can download these errors to quickly identify and fix them.

Ready to get started?

To dive in, navigate to the Send Merits folder in the Organization Portal and choose the Upload Spreadsheet tab.

Need more help?

Visit our Help Center for step-by-step instructions on how to get started. You can also reach out to help@merits.com for more answers.

This article first appeared in CERT Responder Magazine

Picture this...

You’re managing an activity that requires participant check-ins, credential validation, and even time tracking and reporting. And it’s not a pretty picture considering all of the check-in sheets, time spent confirming participant credentials, and the countless hours adding up total participant time.

We’re excited to introduce you to our new brand – Merit®.

Merit helps power California For All Emergency Preparedness Campaign to deploy a network of volunteers and transform how Californians get ready for the next disaster

If you’re a skydiver, you know Jay Stokes’s name. He’s the former President of the USPA, after all. He came to professional civilian skydiving only after serving in the US Army for 24 years on the military side of the freefall fence, and in that time has earned a veritable gallery of certifications. (These certifications are above and beyond Jay’s two Masters’ degrees.)

If you’ve been running a dropzone for a while, we already know a couple of things about you. Ready?

We expect white lies in our everyday lives and have become accustomed to not necessarily believing everything we hear. Whether it’s someone’s description on a dating app or a resume for work, we take what we hear with a grain of salt. Some people fiercely filter information for fabrications, exaggerations, plagiarism, white lies, and most of all: deception. But as one study suggests, we are on average only able to catch 54% of lies. Strikingly, in the same study, trained police officers, judges, and FBI agents weren’t that much better than the average person.