At some point, someone at your company probably said “can’t we just use the LMS for this?” It makes sense on the surface. You already have a system that tracks training. Licenses require training. Why not put it all in one place?

So you tried it. You set up courses that match CE requirements, you built completion reports, maybe you even created custom fields for license numbers and expiration dates. And for a while it sort of worked.

Then someone’s license expired even though they’d completed all their training in the LMS. Or you needed to verify whether an employee was actually active with the state board and realized the LMS had no way to tell you that. Or you spent a full afternoon manually cross-referencing LMS completion records with what the licensing board’s website actually showed.

That’s usually when the spreadsheet comes back.

Training completion and license status are different things

This is the core problem that no amount of LMS configuration can fix. An LMS answers the question “did this employee complete the required coursework?” A licensing board answers the question “is this employee currently authorized to practice?”

Those sound like the same thing. They’re not.

An employee can complete every CE requirement in your LMS and still have an expired license because they missed the renewal submission deadline, forgot to pay the renewal fee, or didn’t submit their documentation to the board. The LMS shows green. The board shows expired. You don’t find out until someone checks, and usually that someone is checking manually.

Going the other direction, an employee can renew their license through channels your LMS doesn’t know about. They took CE courses at a conference, through a third-party provider, or completed requirements from a previous renewal period that carried over. The LMS shows incomplete. The board shows active. Now you’re chasing someone about training they already did.

The LMS only knows what happens inside the LMS. Licenses live outside of it.

LMS systems weren’t designed for multi-state complexity

If your workforce operates in one state with one license type, an LMS might get you close enough. But the moment you have employees across multiple states, the complexity breaks it.

Take pesticide applicator licenses. Each state has its own board, its own renewal cycle, its own CE categories, and its own lookup system. An employee working in Virginia has different requirements than one in North Carolina, even though they’re doing the same job. An LMS can assign different training tracks per state, but it can’t check whether the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services actually shows that person as currently licensed.

Or take a company managing ISA Certified Arborist credentials alongside state-specific licenses. The ISA credential is national with its own renewal cycle and CE requirements. The pesticide license is state-level with completely different requirements. The CDL medical card is on yet another timeline. An LMS would need three separate tracking systems bolted together, none of which can verify against the actual source.

Most LMS platforms weren’t built for this. They were built to deliver training content and track completion. That’s a genuinely useful thing. It’s just not the same thing as compliance.

The verification gap is where the risk lives

The real cost isn’t inefficiency. It’s the gap between what your system says and what’s actually true.

If your LMS says an employee is compliant and the state board says they’re not, you have a liability problem. If an auditor, a utility customer, or an insurance carrier asks for proof of current licensure, an LMS completion certificate isn’t proof. The license status on the state board’s website is proof.

Companies deal with this gap in one of two ways. Either someone is manually checking government websites to verify every employee — which works until it doesn’t scale — or nobody is checking, and the assumption is that training completion equals compliance. The second option is more common and more dangerous.

What would actually solve this

The missing piece isn’t better training tracking. It’s verification against the primary source. A system that checks the actual licensing board — whether that’s the ISA, a state department of agriculture, an electrical licensing board, or an FMCSA database — and tells you whether each employee’s credentials are current.

That means automated checks on a schedule, not manual lookups when someone remembers to do them. It means status alerts when something changes, before a license actually expires. And it means a single view that shows compliance across every license type and every state, so when someone asks “are we good?” the answer doesn’t require a week of spreadsheet work.

The LMS still has a role. It’s great for delivering training. It’s just not the right tool for confirming that training actually resulted in a valid, current license.

This is what CourseCounter does

We built CourseCounter specifically for the gap between training and verified compliance. The platform checks employee licenses directly against state and national licensing boards, tracks CE requirements by category and renewal cycle, and gives you a dashboard that shows exactly where every employee stands.

Your employees can use the mobile app to log CE credits they earn anywhere — conferences, third-party providers, employer-assigned training. Those credits sync to the admin dashboard automatically. And the verification engine confirms license statuses against the boards themselves, so you’re not relying on self-reporting or LMS completion records as your source of truth.

If you’ve been trying to make your LMS do something it wasn’t built to do, I’d like to hear about it. We’re building this for the people who’ve lived with the workarounds and know exactly where they break down.

Reach me at carl@coursecounter.com or take a look at coursecounter.com.