The 8 Pillars of a Modern CPR Training Platform
What “good” really looks like for students, instructors, employers, and networks.
Last week I shared why we built Hovn and what we kept seeing behind the scenes: no student system of record, centers unable to really help sites and instructors grow, and a DMV‑style experience for students.
This week I want to answer a different question:
If you were designing a CPR training platform from scratch, what would “great” actually look like?
Until you define that, it’s hard to judge any tool – Hovn included.
Start With the Outcome, Not the Features
To us, a modern CPR training platform is infrastructure.
It’s the central system that owns the relationship between a student, their certifications, and the provider who trains them.
And it should do one thing extremely well:
Make it easy for people to take a class with you, have a great experience, and come back when they need it again.
For students, that means:
They know where to go and what to do
They get clear instructions and reminders
Their certifications live in one place they can actually find
For providers, that means:
You look professional to students and employers
You’re not rebuilding the process from scratch for every class
Our constraint for Hovn is simple:
If a feature doesn’t make the experience better for students and employers, or
Reduce the manual work you do to deliver that experience,
…it doesn’t belong in the product.
You also shouldn’t have to be a UX designer, an e‑commerce expert, and a platform architect to run a training business.
Our job as the platform is to study what works across a high volume of transactions, learn from it, and then bake those best practices into the product – registration flows, reminders, employer workflows, catalogs – so you don’t have to make every mistake and optimization yourself.
We’re not designing for a single training center; we’re the infrastructure underneath. When we find a better way to deliver a student or employer experience, we implement it once and it improves for you automatically.
In practice, that means putting standards and structure under everything – students, courses, locations, instructors, employers – so Hovn behaves like a platform instead of a pile of disconnected tools you have to orchestrate by hand.
With that in mind, here’s the checklist we use to define “modern.”
The 8 Pillars of a Modern CPR Platform
You can use this to review whatever you’re on today.
1. Student system of record
There is one student profile across your whole operation (and ideally across a network):
You can answer “Who is this student?”, “What have we done for them?”, and “What expires next?” in one place.
Their classes, certs, locations, instructors, and materials are connected like a travel itinerary, not scattered across five systems.
2. Standardized catalog and locations
Courses and locations aren’t free‑text guesswork:
Courses use agency identifiers and standard names, even if you present friendlier labels to students.
Locations are real addresses (e.g. Google Maps data) with sensible roll‑ups (city/region), so “everyone teaching BLS Friday in Phoenix” is a query, not a research project.
3. Instructor & site profiles
Instructors and sites have real accounts, not just rows in a sheet:
Eligibility (“what are they certified to teach, where are they located, and what are they scheduled for?”) is stored once and reused.
Updates happen in one place and propagate to everyone who should see them.
A center can actually see its network of sites/instructors, not just names in a roster.
4. Online registration & payment flow
Registration that meets today's design standard:
A clear “highway path”: pick your certification & modality → pick time & place → pay. Extra education and edge‑case info are on‑ramps.
Information is revealed and requested as it is necessary, not as a giant wall of text & forms.
Pages are mobile-optimized with machine-readable local SEO
5. Student portal & renewals engine
Students don’t live out of an inbox:
One place where they see what they registered for, what’s next, and what’s expiring.
Materials, instructions, and reminders all accessible from that system.
Renewals are driven by the platform to the correct class, not a hope and a Mailchimp list.
6. Certification & compliance as one pipeline
Certifications aren’t a separate universe. The platform connects your rosters directly to agency systems so certifications are mapped to agency standards without extra steps.
Registration → roster → agency → certification → student profile is a single pipeline.
You’re not exporting spreadsheets just to upload them somewhere else.
If a student has multiple certs across agencies, you can still see one picture.
7. B2B / employer accounts
Employers are first‑class citizens:
Clients have profiles with their staff, cert status, and sessions.
Open‑enrollment and group classes can both be tied back to an employer.
Invoices are generated from orders in the system, not from someone reconciling coupons once a month.
8. Reporting and network visibility
You can actually see what’s going on:
By student: history, expirations, classes, orders.
By client: staff certification status, classes delivered, revenue.
By network: “show me who is teaching BLS in New York City on Friday,” “show me all locations that work with Acme Dental”
If you don’t have separate concepts for students, orders, classes, instructors, clients, courses, and locations, you can’t really do this. You just have a registration log.
Why This Matters Beyond Convenience
This isn’t just about nicer software or cleaner reports.
When you put real infrastructure under CPR training – these eight pillars – something bigger happens:
Training Centers and Sites can function like real networks or mini‑brands, not just wholesalers selling cards.
Students can actually find the right classes and have a clean, professional experience end‑to‑end.
Instructors have a real shot at building a viable business, because they’re not gluing together websites, spreadsheets, and agency portals on their own.
Employers get a clear view of their staff and an easier way to work with providers long term.
That’s how the industry grows again: more people take classes, the topics get more specific to what students and employers actually need, and everyone stops fighting over the same saturated “required for work” renewals.
Today’s Action Step: Score Yourself
Take 5–10 minutes and run a quick self‑audit.
For each of the 8 pillars, give your current setup a score:
0 = Not really (we don’t have this at all)
1 = Sort of (we patch this together with spreadsheets / manual work)
2 = Yes (this is handled cleanly in a system)
Add up your score (max 16):
0–6: Duct tape – one human away from chaos
7–12: Limited and fragile – you’re making it work with a lot of effort
13–16: Modern – you’ve got real infrastructure under you
If you’d like us to review your score and show you what your setup would look like in Hovn:
Next, we’ll dig into what most existing training software gets wrong when you look at it through this checklist.
Talk soon,
Jon and Shubs
Co‑founders, Hovn
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