Certifiable: Developing home-grown ‘certification’

A few weeks ago, I said that initiatives become standard practice.  Today I’m telling you, they’d better be worth it.

I’m working with a couple of teams to propose a set of program options for certification with one group – we’re the training, HR, management cabal.  And with a group of senior experts in an area, I’m participating as a team member to recommend a certification system for people in a range of roles.

Why?

“Certification” means that a group has taken responsibility for attesting that a person is skilled at the level of standards set by the group.  So, if the certifying body thinks that taking a twenty-question multiple choice test is sufficient to stamp an individual “certified,” they may.  CPAs and Certified Financial Planners undergo rigorous preparation and a grueling test before to demonstrate that they have achieved certification proficiency.  While there are many common conceptions of certification, it means whatever the certifying body says it means.

Raising the standards of learning, practice, and self-regulation

So if an organization, say mine, is going to certify people in some domain or role, it will (should) spend plenty of time determining what certification means to it and the people in it.  But like all certifications, it is commonly intended to raise the standards of preparation for work in that field, increase the professionalism of people of the field, and make proficiency a self-conscious goal of people practicing in that field. In layman’s terms: higher standards for learning, practice, and self-regulation.

Isn’t training enough?

Training is typically designed to achieve day to day proficiency.  If you think training can’t do enough for people some area, give the training department friendly shakedown.   Because for most jobs, training can provide enough preparation and development most of the time.  Certification, therefore,  must go beyond training by a good deal.  And teams creating certification should bring to the surface the fact that they are addressing other organizational goals:  training is broken or inadequate, oversight is insufficient, inspectors and auditors look at processes and practices with concern, authority is distributed (and being conferred on individuals in certification), to name a few possibilities.

Where training is short, certification is long.  That is, if last years training courses aren’t working for your people, wash them out and redesign, rebuild, restructure.  The costs are real, but lower than certification.  The decision-making over a certification that’s worth having will take some months.  The standard-setting process and the work involved in developing a fair and robust evaluation of certification candidates is significant.  A couple of managing and adjudicating bodies need to be set up and committed for a period.  One group establishes and keeps the operation running.   The other evaluates the evaluation, judges any interpretive questions in the evaluation, and is responsible for conferring the certification.  The members will likely set policy and determine the re-certification plan.  Certification is long in the sense that it will require momentum, and without it the certification wont continue to be credible.  And that is somebody’s work.

The hard, good work

Imagine certification at your company.  You take a course of study, including company training and some continuing ed. courses at the local college.  You  rotate through some job shadowing assignments and do a four-week internship in a department you work with all the time but which, frankly, no one understands well.  You do a project, you manage a discussion thread on the intranet, and you prepare for some kind of evaluation.  (I’ll have more to say about evaluations later.)

When you think about taking that evaluation, is the first thing that goes through your mind, “Am I prepared?”  I hope so.  Because the hard good work in any certification program is to define what you – and your people – will have gotten out of each of those interesting, broadening activities.  It’s all going to be on the evaluation.  Doing anything less is a set-up, if you’re the one in the program, or whitewash, if you’re the proposing and running the certification.