The System Is Designed to Fail
Why CPR certification is stuck at 10%, and how infrastructure—not interest—is holding us back.
Welcome to SitRep #001.
Each week, we send a short field note on how we fix the broken infrastructure behind CPR and medical training ops. If you’re running a training business—or building one—you’ll find tactical insight on discoverability, student experience, and the systems that scale trust.
Join hundreds of instructors, admins, and operators who are rethinking how this industry works.
A motivated student starts to register, then ghosts.
We blame timing, price, attention spans.
But what if the real culprit is invisible?
What if “low demand” is just the by-product of bad design—software design.
Let’s look at the numbers:
90 % of the U.S. population remains uncertified.
Among the 10 % who do certify, 95 % attend only because a job, school, or license forces them.
That voluntary 5 % proves the desire is there—yet most never make it to checkout because the process to find, register, and complete a class is loaded with friction.
And that friction isn’t random; it’s baked into the tools the industry still uses.
Students Want to Book. Not Bounce.
Try registering for a CPR class today:
Google “BLS class near me.”
Land on a directory—you cannot register… it’s just websites and phone numbers.
Click out to another site, answer the same questions.
Maybe you reach a checkout page; maybe you give up.
Imagine booking a haircut or flight this way. You wouldn’t. Yet we expect learners to tolerate it.
Why?
Because the software that runs most training centers was built to manage rosters, not to make classes discoverable.
Friction Isn’t a Bug. It’s the System.
Most of this friction comes from the tools training centers require their instructors to use.
Take Enrollware — one of the platforms that helped bring medical training operations online.
It played a critical role in the early wave of digital adoption. It made it possible for instructors to move past paper rosters and offer online registration — a foundational shift for the industry.
But today’s challenge isn’t getting online. It’s getting found.
Students search with urgency. Employers expect trust. And instructors can’t afford to spend time chasing traffic when the tools they’re required to use were never built to support visibility.
Legacy systems like Enrollware weren’t designed for discoverability, structured data, or network-wide insights in mind. They were built to manage registrations — not drive demand.
If you’re relying on systems built for registration management, you’re not just losing traffic—you’re invisible to the market you could be leading.”
And because those systems are still required for compliance, instructors must independently market their best asset: availability.
This is how a market stays small.
What Happens When You Can’t Be Found
When a student can’t easily compare options or book a class in one step, demand drops.
When every instructor is forced to build their own site, domain authority gets spread razor-thin.
When every network uses its own class names, URLs, and descriptions, Google can’t recognize what’s being offered—so it doesn’t show anything at all.
The result: providers compete over the same 5% of “must-certify” students. Prices fall. Margins collapse. Growth stalls.
And everyone thinks the problem is demand.
The Real Fix Is Infrastructure
We don’t need better marketing. We need better plumbing.
Imagine:
One system where training centers can see their entire network’s availability in real time.
A platform where every class is structured for modern SEO and indexable by search engines.
A foundation that supports demand creation without requiring every instructor to build their own site.
This isn’t hypothetical. It’s how Hovn works today. Our platform gives providers a 30% organic traffic lift by applying modern SEO and structuring class data the way Google expects.
The system isn’t broken by chance. It was built this way. But we don’t have to keep it that way.
When We Fix the Pipes, the Flow Changes
Students win: Easier discovery → more certifications
Instructors win: Better visibility → fewer ads → higher margins
Training centers win: Network-wide availability → better insights → stronger brand
And maybe, just maybe we start to move from a compliance-driven market to a mission-driven one.
More people trained. More lives saved. More providers thriving.
That starts with changing the infrastructure.
💬 Want to See How Modern SEO and Network Visibility Work?
We’ll show you how to:
Make your classes visible to Google
View and manage instructor availability across your network
Lay the foundation for scalable, modern demand