Everything you need to know
about Skills Dashboard

Gather your training transcripts. Common sources for each provider:

• FEMA Independent Study (EMI) — Log into training.fema.gov → My Courses → Download Transcript PDF
• NCEM (NC Emergency Management) — Log into the NCEM training portal, navigate to your transcript, and export
• NREMT — Log into nremt.org → CE Activity Log → Export
• Red Cross — Log into redcross.org → My Certifications, then download completion certificates. Or ask your instructor for a class roster PDF.
• Medical Reserve Corps (MRC) — Contact your local MRC unit coordinator. They typically maintain records in MRC Community (mrc.hhs.gov). Ask for a training transcript or volunteer activity report.
• HealthStream / Cornerstone / Relias — Look for a "Download Transcript" or "Export to PDF/CSV" option in your profile or My Learning section
• APCO / ENP — Log into apco911.org → Training → My Transcripts

Don't have everything digital? No problem — use Manual Entry for any paper certificates or records you can't export. You can always add more later.

The profile drives personalization throughout the dashboard. Here's exactly what each field controls:

• Full Name * — Appears as the dashboard title. Required. Use your professional name as you'd write it on a credential application.
• Organization / Agency — Shown under your name on the dashboard header. Use your current employer or primary agency.
• Title / Role — Shown next to your name. Use your actual working title (e.g., "Paramedic," "EM Coordinator," "PSAP Supervisor").
• Discipline / Role (dropdown) — This is the most important field. It controls three things: (1) which NIMS courses appear in the compliance panel, (2) what CE requirement the progress ring measures, and (3) what shows in the Gaps Analyzer. Pick the option that matches your primary license or certification. If you hold multiple (e.g., Paramedic + RN), pick the one with the more demanding CE requirement.
• Cert Cycle Start — The start date of your current renewal window. The CE tracker uses this to only count hours earned after this date. For NREMT, it's the first day of your current 2-year cycle. For CISSP, it's your last recertification date.

Advanced fields (click "▾ Advanced fields" to expand):

• Tagline — A one-line motto or professional statement shown under your name on the dashboard. Optional but makes the PDF output look sharp.
• Bio / Description — 2–3 sentences about your background. Appears on the dashboard and exported PDF. Great for promotional packets.
• Hour Goal — Set a target (e.g., 500 hours). The Training Velocity section shows a progress bar and predicts when you'll hit it based on your current pace.
• CEU Goal — Same concept for CEU totals.

Yes — individual certificate PDFs work the same as transcripts. Just drop the PDF onto the drop zone. The tool handles single-cert cards differently from multi-course transcripts: it focuses on extracting the one credential rather than looking for rows.

What gets pulled from an AHA Heartsaver / BLS / ACLS card:

• Credential name (e.g., "Heartsaver CPR AED")
• Optional modules completed (e.g., "+ Infant CPR" appended to the name)
• Issue date
• Renew By date — stored as the exact expiration date, not calculated
• Training center name → saved as the Provider
• eCard code → saved as your Cert ID for easy verification at heart.org/cpr/mycards

What gets pulled from a Red Cross certificate:

• Credential name and type (Lifeguarding, BLS, DAT, Disaster Health Services, etc.)
• Completion date
• Expiration date if printed on the cert
• Certificate/card number
• Instructor name → saved in notes

This is one of the most powerful features — your FEMA transcript, Red Cross certs, NREMT CE log, MRC training records, and hospital LMS courses can all live in one dashboard.

The process:

1. Import your first file (e.g., your FEMA PDF)
2. Drop in your second file (e.g., your NREMT CE export)
3. When prompted — "You already have X courses loaded. Add or Replace?" — choose Add
4. Repeat for each additional provider

Duplicates are filtered automatically based on course name + date. If the same course appears on two different transcripts (common with cross-listed NIMS courses), only one copy is kept.

The Review Table appears automatically after importing. Every parsed course shows as one editable row. All changes save instantly to your browser session. Column headers stay fixed as you scroll — you can always see what each column is without scrolling back to the top.

• Date — Click to open a date picker. Fix any dates the parser got wrong.
• Course Name — Click to edit directly. Useful for cleaning up OCR artifacts or abbreviations.
• Credits/Hours — Edit the number. FEMA IS courses auto-populate from the official FEMA catalog. A FEMA est. badge means the hours came from the catalog. A red ⚠ enter hours badge means no hours were found — enter them manually. A neutral 0h (catalog) badge means the FEMA catalog officially lists that course as 0 hours (awareness modules) — that's expected and correct.
• Category — Dropdown to reassign a course to the right discipline. The tool now uses score-based matching, so most courses land in the right category automatically.
• Provider — Edit the provider name. This affects the Partners panel and credential detection.
• Expires — Enter an exact printed expiration date to override the automatic calculation. When this is blank and the issue date is also missing, the credential card shows a nudge prompting you to add it.
• 📝 Note — Click to attach a private annotation (e.g., "Used for NREMT cycle 2024–2026"). Notes carry through to all exports.

Sorting: Click any column header — Date, Course Name, Credits, or Provider — to sort the table. Click again to reverse. A ▲/▼ indicator shows the active sort direction.

Bulk editing: Check multiple rows, then use the Re-assign category dropdown to update all selected courses at once. All selection/reassignment dialogs now use in-app modals rather than browser pop-ups.

The NIMS panel checks for the core ICS/NIMS courses required by the National Incident Management System for your selected role. The required set varies by discipline — an EM Coordinator needs ICS-100 through ICS-400, while a Healthcare Provider needs IS-702 rather than IS-800.

The panel now shows two things:

• The full checklist — every required course with ✓ (completed) or — (missing), the course code, and full course name.
• A "Missing courses" action panel — if you're not fully compliant, a red section lists every missing course with a direct Register → link to training.fema.gov so you can enroll immediately. All FEMA IS courses are free.

Select your primary discipline in Step 1 (Profile) and the CE ring shows your progress toward that discipline's renewal requirement. The ring fills as you accumulate qualifying hours. The tracker supports:

• EMS: EMR (16 hrs), EMT-Basic (30 hrs / NCCP), AEMT (40 hrs), Paramedic (60 hrs / NCCP breakdown)
• Nursing: RN/LPN CE requirements, CNE credits
• Fire: Fire Instructor, Fire Officer CE tracking
• Emergency Management: CEM/AEM CEU requirements
• Public Health: CHES/MCHES (75 CE credits / 5-yr cycle)
• IT / Cybersecurity: CISSP (120 CPE), CISM (120 CPE), CompTIA (50 CEU), CEH (120 ECE), AWS/Azure/GCP, Cisco CCNA/CCNP
• Telecom: APCO CPD requirements

The tracker uses your course dates to estimate which hours fall within your current renewal window. For the most accurate picture, make sure your course dates in the Review Table are correct.

When you import an AHA eCard PDF, the tool reads the Renew By date directly from the card and stores it as the exact expiration date. This is more accurate than calculating from the issue date because AHA sometimes adjusts renewal windows mid-cycle.

For example, a card issued 5/20/2024 with "Renew By 05/2026" gets stored as expires May 31, 2026 — the last day of the renewal month. The credential card on your dashboard will show a 📌 pin icon to indicate the date came from the certificate itself, not from a formula.

If you're entering manually rather than importing the PDF:

• Enter the issue date in the Date field
• Enter the Renew By date in the Expires field (the last field in the manual entry row)
• Name it exactly as on the card: "Heartsaver CPR AED" or "BLS Provider"
• Provider: "AHA" or the training center name (e.g., "Premedics, Inc.")
• Cert ID: your eCard code number

Mental Health First Aid certificates are issued by the National Council for Mental Wellbeing and have some unusual formatting — the text is printed sideways, the expiry rule is written as "3 yr from effective date" rather than giving an actual date, and hours are buried in a small-print line on the left margin. The tool handles all of this automatically.

What gets extracted from a MHFA USA certificate:

• Credential variant — Adult, Youth, or Teen Mental Health First Aid
• Effective date (the completion / certification date)
• Expiration date — automatically calculated as effective date + 3 years. For example, effective 02/13/2025 → expires 02/13/2028
• Hours — 8 contact hours (the standard for Adult MHFA; extracted from the CE eligibility text if present)
• Provider — National Council for Mental Wellbeing

These "Certificate of Attendance" style documents — where an agency or department issues a physical certificate for completing a workshop — are now supported. The tool looks for:

• "Certificate of Attendance" or "Certificate of Completion" anywhere in the document
• "AWARDED N.N CONTACT HOURS" — the hours statement used by many state and local programs
• The course name (e.g., "C.A.R.E. Training", "Stop the Bleed", "Crisis Intervention Training")
• The event date — including written formats like "MARCH 26TH, 2025"
• The issuing organization (e.g., "Tennessee Department of Health")

Courses recognized automatically from this format include: C.A.R.E. Training, Stop the Bleed, Psychological First Aid, Crisis Intervention Training (CIT), De-Escalation Training, Active Shooter Response, Naloxone/Narcan Training, Hands-Only CPR, Bloodborne Pathogens, CERT, and generic emergency preparedness workshops. Unknown course names are imported with the raw title text — you can rename them in the Review Table.

• PDF Document — For printing, emailing to supervisors, submitting to credentialing bodies, or attaching to promotion packets. In the print dialog: set Destination to "Save as PDF," Layout to Portrait, and enable Background Graphics. The PDF includes all charts, the credential tracker, NIMS panel, and CE progress ring.
• HTML Dashboard — A self-contained file that opens in any browser. Interactive — clicking still works. Great for sharing over Teams, SharePoint, or email when the recipient should be able to scroll through it rather than just print it. No app required to open it.
• CSV Spreadsheet — A flat table of all your courses with date, name, hours, category, provider, cert ID, expiration date, and notes. Use this for agencies that want raw data, for importing into another system, or for maintaining a master training log in Excel or Google Sheets.
• .skillsdash Data File — Your session backup. Not a human-readable report — just the structured data file for re-importing. Keep this; share the others.
• 🔒 Sharing — Export your dashboard as a PDF, self-contained HTML file, or .skillsdash data file. Skills Dashboard is privacy-first — your data never leaves your browser, so there's no shareable URL. The HTML export is the closest equivalent: a single file that opens in any browser with no installation required.

Team View lets you load multiple .skillsdash files at once and see a side-by-side compliance matrix. It's designed for:

• Training officers doing monthly compliance checks
• MRC coordinators reviewing unit readiness before an activation
• EM directors auditing NIMS completion before a grant submission deadline
• Agency HR teams reviewing CE status ahead of license renewals

How to use it:

1. Ask each team member to use the dashboard to build their own profile, then export their .skillsdash file and send it to you
2. Open Team View from the main dashboard menu
3. Drop all the .skillsdash files at once
4. The compliance matrix builds automatically — green ✓ or red — for each person across ICS-100, ICS-200, IS-700, IS-800, ICS-300, ICS-400
5. Team-wide gaps (courses nobody has) appear in a banner at the top
6. Expiring credentials across the team are sorted by urgency

Click 🎯 Gaps on the dashboard action bar. It runs four checks and groups results into Required/Urgent and Recommended/Optional:

The credential cards on your main dashboard show status at a glance. The Renewal Calendar (click 📅 Renewals) gives you the full prioritized action list:

• Every trackable credential in one list, sorted by urgency — expired first, then <90 days, then <180 days, then current/permanent
• A progress bar for each credential — shows what fraction of the renewal cycle has elapsed. A bar that's 90% consumed means you're near the end of the valid period even if months remain.
• Exact expiration dates — rendered as "Jun 15, 2026" rather than "~7 mo left" so you can plan against a real calendar
• Section counts — e.g., "🔴 Expired (2)" so you immediately know how many need immediate action vs. just monitoring

Click ⬇ Export → PDF Document for the cleanest print output. The full dashboard PDF includes:

• Your name, title, agency, tagline, and bio exactly as entered in your profile
• The four hero stats (courses, hours, credentials, training span)
• Training diversity chart and areas of focus table
• Credentials tracker with color-coded status
• NIMS compliance panel
• CE progress ring for your discipline
• Monthly activity chart showing year-over-year training trends

Print settings that matter:

• Destination → "Save as PDF"
• Layout → Portrait
• Margins → None or Minimum
• Scale → Default (100%)
• Background graphics → ON (critical — without this, all colored charts and status badges print as white boxes)

Skills Dashboard is built with a strict privacy-first design — your training data never touches a server, so there's no shareable URL that encodes your data. Instead, use the ⬇ Export menu, which gives you three sharing options depending on your audience:

• PDF Document — Best for supervisors, hiring managers, and promotion packets. A polished print-quality document named Your Name - Skills Dashboard.pdf. Share via email or include in a packet. No app needed to view it.
• HTML Dashboard — Best for coordinators and team leads who want the full interactive experience. A self-contained file that opens in any browser, shows all sections and panels, and embeds your data for re-import. The recipient can open it on their phone, tablet, or desktop with no installation.
• .skillsdash Data File — Best for passing your record to a team leader who runs Team View, or for backing up before a major update. Reload it any time by dropping it on the import screen.

The Sessions Manager (click 📂 Sessions on the import screen) lets you name and store up to 5 snapshots of your training record in your browser. When you click 💾 Save, an in-app dialog (not a browser pop-up) asks you to name the session — it suggests your name and role as a default.

From the Sessions Manager you can:

• Load any previous session — restores all courses, profile, and settings
• See when each session was saved and how many courses it contained
• Delete sessions with a confirmation dialog so you never accidentally lose one

In Step 1 (Profile), click ▾ Advanced fields to expand the optional settings. You'll find:

• Hour Goal — Enter a total career hours target (e.g., 500 or 1000 hours). Once set, the Training Velocity panel shows a progress bar toward that goal and projects the month you'll reach it based on your current pace. It updates live as you add more courses.
• CEU Goal — Enter a CEU target for your current renewal cycle (e.g., 30 CEU for an EMT). The CE ring on the dashboard fills toward this number rather than the default requirement if you enter one here.

Every course row in the Review Table has a 📝 note button on the right. Click it to reveal a text field where you can attach a private annotation to that specific course. Notes are saved with your session and appear on your exported dashboard and PDF.

Useful things to put in notes:

• CE allocation — "Counted toward NREMT 2024–2026 cycle" or "Applied to CISSP CPE Category 1"
• Cert verification context — "Instructor cert — authorized to teach AHA BLS through Dec 2026"
• Credential linkage — "Prerequisite for ICS-300 completed 2023-08-14"
• MRC notes — "Unit activation exercise — Mecklenburg County MRC Unit 4"
• Override explanation — "Hours updated from 2h to 16h per TEEX official transcript" (useful so future-you knows why it was edited)

The Review Table uses four badges to tell you exactly what happened with each course's hours:

• FEMA est. — Hours came from the official FEMA course catalog. This is reliable and you don't need to do anything.
• converted — Hours were converted from a CEU or PDH value (e.g., 0.4 CEU → 4 hours). Check that the conversion looks right for your discipline.
• 0h (catalog) — The FEMA catalog officially lists this course as 0 contact hours (typically short awareness modules like IS-1151). This is correct — don't change it.
• ⚠ enter hours — No hours were found anywhere. Enter them manually in the Credits field. Check your original certificate for the hour count.

Two methods depending on how many need fixing:

• One or two courses — In the Review Table, click the Category dropdown on the row and select the correct discipline.
• Many courses — Use the checkboxes to select all affected rows (you can click the top checkbox to select all, then uncheck the ones that are correct). Once you have a group selected, the Bulk Reassign Category dropdown appears at the top — pick the right category and they all update at once.

The most common miscategorizations:

• Mental health courses going to "Public Health" instead of "Behavioral Health" — reassign manually
• MRC-specific exercises landing in "EM Operations" — reassign to "MRC & Volunteer Health"
• Red Cross courses landing in "Nursing & Allied Health" — reassign to the appropriate category (MRC, EMS, or Health & Safety)
• State-specific courses with non-standard names — edit the course name to include a recognizable keyword

The Credentials panel only shows courses the tool recognizes as formal credentials (things with expiration dates or that represent professional certification). If yours is missing:

1. Check the Review Table — does the course name include the full credential name? "BLS" works; "Basic Life Support Annual Hospital Module" may not. Try editing it to a standard name.
2. If the credential is highly specialized (niche agency cert, proprietary vendor credential), add it via Manual Entry. Enter the expiry date in the Expires field — that forces it into the tracker regardless of automatic recognition.
3. Make sure the course has a completion date. Grey cards (no date) appear in the tracker but don't calculate expiration.

This is a PDF encoding issue — some PDFs use non-standard font encoding and the text extractor picks up symbols instead of the correct characters. The most common culprit is PDFs generated by older LMS platforms or government systems.

Quick fixes:

• Edit the course name directly in the Review Table
• For widespread garbling on a single transcript: try the Paste method instead — open the PDF in Chrome, select all text, copy, and paste into the Paste tab. Chrome's built-in PDF renderer handles encoding better than the automatic extractor.
• Export as CSV from the source system if that option is available

Maybe not — check the browser save first:

1. Reopen the dashboard in the same browser on the same device
2. Click 📂 Sessions at the top of the import screen
3. If a browser-saved session is listed, click Restore

If there's no saved session, you'll need to re-import your transcripts. Going forward: get in the habit of clicking ⬇ Backup → Save after every session. Takes 2 seconds and gives you a permanent backup.

Yes — the tool is mobile-responsive and works on iOS (Safari/Chrome) and Android (Chrome). A few things to know:

• PDF import on mobile — Works on most devices. Tap the drop zone, select your PDF from Files. The parser runs the same as on desktop. Large PDFs may take a few seconds longer on older phones.
• File saving on iOS — When you tap ⬇ Backup to download your .skillsdash file, iOS will prompt you to save it to Files. Choose "On My iPhone" or iCloud Drive — avoid AirDrop for this, as it sometimes changes the file extension.
• Review Table on small screens — The table scrolls horizontally. On very small screens (under 380px) some columns may be tight. Pinch to zoom or rotate to landscape for a better view.
• PDF print/export on mobile — Tap Export → PDF, then use your browser's share sheet to "Print" and select "Save to Files" as a PDF. The background graphics option is in the print preview settings (tap the expand arrow if you don't see it).

Click 🎯 Set Goal in the logbook header. Fill in three things:

• Goal name — e.g. "Paramedic Clinical Hours" or "EMAP Field Experience"
• Target hours — the number you need to reach (required)
• Deadline — when you need to hit the goal (optional but adds pace calculations)
• Count from — a start date if only hours earned after a certain date count (e.g. program start date)

Once set, a progress bar appears at the top of the logbook showing:

• Hours earned vs target (e.g. 187.5 / 500h)
• Percentage complete with a color-coded bar (red → yellow → blue → green)
• Pace needed to hit the deadline — "Need 312.5h more · 12.5h/week · 1.8h/day"

Click "+ Log Hours" from the logbook screen. The entry form works like a time clock terminal — a live digital clock runs in the header showing the current time and date. You fill in two steps:

• Browser autosave — Every entry save or delete triggers an autosave to this browser. Survives restarts but not browser data clearing.
• .skillsdash file — Logbook entries and your goal are included. This is the permanent backup — download after every session you care about.
• HTML Dashboard export — Entries are embedded and appear in the Field Experience panel when opened.
• ⬇ Export CSV — Downloads all entries as YourName_PracticalHours_2026-05-22.csv with all fields: date, times, auto-calculated hours, type, activity, location, supervisor, reference number, and notes. Hand this to a program coordinator as your hours log.