How to Download Your Certificate

The short version

Open your credential page. Take the PDF if you are going to print it or attach it where a file is asked for, and save the image shown on the page if it is going on a screen. The image is rendered at twice normal screen resolution, so it holds up when it is enlarged; the PDF is a page-sized document, which is what a printer and a file upload field both want.

The more useful answer is that you probably need the link rather than either file. A downloaded certificate is a copy: it looks right, it prints well, and it proves nothing to the person you give it to. Most of the situations that send people looking for a download are better served by sending the address of the page they downloaded it from.

Where the download is

Digital credentials are almost always hosted on a page rather than sent as an attachment, and the download lives on that page. Three routes to it:

• The email you were sent when it was issued. It contains a link to your credential page. The download is on the page, not in the email.
• The QR code on a printed copy, if somebody handed you paper. Scanning it opens the same page.
• The credential ID, if you have that and nothing else. Ask the issuer and they can find the record from it. What a credential ID is covers where it is usually printed.

On a Certifications.ng credential page the download button gives you the PDF, and the certificate you can see on the page is the PNG, which your browser will save if you ask it to. You do not need an account, and neither does anybody you send the page to.

Which format you actually need

Two files are produced for every credential, and they are not interchangeable. Choosing by what you are about to do with it takes about a second and saves the common outcome, which is a blurry certificate embedded in a document.

PDF for anything that will be printed, attached to an application, or included in a document. It arrives at the size of a page, it is what an employer's file upload field expects, and it is the only one of the two that will not be rescaled by whatever opens it.

PNG for anything that will be looked at on a screen: a post, a slide, or the media attachment on a LinkedIn certification entry. It is a plain image, so it displays anywhere without a viewer.

What to avoid is converting between them by screenshotting. A screenshot of a PDF is an image of whatever size your window happened to be, and it is usually the version that ends up looking amateur next to the certificate it was made from.

Digital badges work the same way and produce the same two files. The difference between a badge and a certificate is mostly a matter of the artwork rather than the machinery, and how badges work here covers the product side of it.

The file is not the credential

This is the part worth taking away, because it inverts what most people assume they are doing when they download a certificate.

The file is a rendering. The credential is the record it was rendered from, and the verification page is where that record can be seen. When you send somebody the PDF, you are asking them to accept a document you have handed them, which is precisely the position that makes certificates so easy to forge and so tedious to check. When you send them the link, they are reading the issuer's own record.

The practical consequence: keep the link, not just the file, and send the link whenever you have the choice. Sharing a certificate sets out what each one hands to the person receiving it. A PDF in a folder is fine for your own records and useless as evidence three years from now, when the question is not whether you have a document but whether it corresponds to anything. If you want to see what happens at that moment, verifying a certificate online is the same question from the other side.

There is one thing a file does that a link cannot, and it is worth naming fairly: it works when the issuer does not. An organisation that closes, or migrates its systems badly, can take a verification page with it. Keeping your own copy of both is not paranoia. Just do not mistake the copy for the proof.

If you have lost the email

Common, and usually recoverable. In order of effort:

• Search your inbox for the issuing organisation's name rather than for the word "certificate", and search the spam folder. Issuance emails frequently arrive from a sending service rather than from the organisation's own domain, so the sender name is not always what you expect.
• Check the address it was sent to. Credentials are issued against one email address, and if you gave your employer's address on the enrolment form, that is where it went.
• Ask the issuer to resend it. They can, and it costs them very little. Give them your full name as enrolled, the award, and the approximate date.

One thing worth knowing before you assume it was never sent: some credentials are issued but not yet published, and a page that says it is being prepared is not an error. If yours says that, it is coming.

Printing it

Use the PDF. Print at actual size rather than fitting to the page, which is what shaves the border off and makes an otherwise good certificate look reproduced.

If your certificate carries a QR code, check that it scans from the printed copy before you rely on it. A code that has been scaled down or printed faintly can look correct and not read at all, which is worth catching before you hand it to somebody rather than while they are holding it.

A printed certificate is the least checkable form of a credential and there is no way around that: paper cannot carry a working link, only a pointer to one. Putting a certificate on your CV deals with the same problem where it bites hardest.

Keeping it somewhere you will find it

The version of this that fails is a file called certificate.pdf in a downloads folder, indistinguishable from four others with the same name.

Rename it as you save it: issuer, award, year. Save the credential link in the same place, in a plain text file if nothing else, because the link is the part you will actually need and the part that is not recoverable from the file. If you hold several credentials, one folder with a short index costs ten minutes once and saves the afternoon you would otherwise spend on it during an application.

If you issue certificates

Recipients ask for downloads constantly, and the request is a symptom. They ask because the file is the only thing they believe they have, which usually means the credential arrived as an attachment rather than as a page.

Issuing to a permanent page changes the shape of the support you provide: a lost file stops being a problem you have to solve, because it was never the thing that mattered and the page is still there. Managing credentials after issuance covers what else changes once the credential lives at an address rather than in an inbox.