Electrician Continuing Education Site

Technologies Used

Introduction

In Oregon and Washington, licensed electricians must complete 4 to 24 hours of continuing education (CE) every three years, with the specific breakdown and core requirements dictated by the exact license type. For most, these classes are conducted in person with a licensed instructor. However, with the movement toward online learning made necessary in the post-covid years, another option was needed.

Problem Set

A local electrician and certification instructor wanted to take his years of teaching continuing education classes, and move them to an online self-serve model. This required 2 main functional requirements. First of all, we needed to create a slim and custom learning management system (LMS) to contain his trade-specific curriculum that came from his in-person classes. Second, we needed to build a front end sophisticated enough to allow electricians in both Oregon and Washington to select their specific license specializations (which, of course, differed by state), and offer the user exactly the classes they would need to renew their license.

How We Worked

Our client mentioned that he reviewed proposals for a number of different vendors, but found Parthenon’s mix of work experience and location to be particularly appealing. We met with him in person several times, but typically worked remotely as we do with many clients. Each week, we deployed our updates to a staging server and showed our progress in a meeting, but as is our usual practice, both we and the client also made extensive use of our project management system outside of those meetings.

Solution

We started by creating a back end tool that would allow the client to present what were at that time PowerPoint slides, through a custom front end. This allowed the client to reuse his many years of experience teaching in-person classes and all of the materials he had created over those years immediately, putting them to use in the new online application. We then developed business logic for the complex matrix of requirements that match a specific type of license with the exact classes and hours required for renewing that license. This allowed customers to select how many CE classes they would like to purchase at the best rate, and for our client to offer discount pricing for buying more than one class at a time.

Implementation

Our client had high expectations for a polished presentation UI, but gave us a large amount of latitude in the actual UI/UX design. What resulted was a clean and modern interface, targeted to the trades, and not requiring any previous online class experience. We extensively used Django’s built-in admin on the back end to let the client load curriculum materials and license requirements into the site on his own.

Final Results

The project was considered a success by our client, who loved the ease of managing his new online business, but also the custom and modern UI/UX design. The client is currently loading up additional class content into the system, and plans to go live in late 2026.