I recently obtained a certification in my field that I had been avoiding getting for most of my career. I considered the process something of a racket, and having successfully achieved it, I still do. The certifying body charges a substantial fee for taking a multiple choice examination that is difficult, not because the content is particulary difficult, but because the question forms are purposely tricky, often with double negative wording and answers known in the prep groups as distractors.
Besides charging a substantial fee for the test, the same organization makes considerable money selling prep materials and courses, which one has to make use of because the exam is based on "the world according to [insert organization name]." It's all based on the models developed in the medical and legal professions, but I suspect as difficult as bar exams are supposed to be, they are not quite so mickey mouse. And I don't know for sure but I don't think the bar exams are proprietary products.
It's all done in the name of "certifying" that a given practitioner supposedly knows something about what he or she is doing. I can understand that, having spent much of my career in an allied "profession" that has no gating mechanism and has all kinds of people claiming that they are [insert acronym] consultants. As regular readers here are aware, I did a lot of human potential personal development in the seventies and eighties. It annoyed me no end when someone who had taken three weekend workshops would stand up and announce that "I am an [acronym] consultant.]" I spent two graduate programs and years of doing the work, and what they knew about the foundations and principles would have filled a small thimble.
I had someone I considered a friend, who was also a bit of a dilletante about any number of professional personas he assumed in his working life, announce one evening that he was an [acronym] consultant. I kept myself from going completely ballistic, but I demurred.
The cert exam in this allied field still seems to me a racket to make money for the organization. Saying that passing their tricked up test says that the certified person can actually do the work is like saying that someone that passes the written drivers test can actually drive. It may or may not be true, and it certainly says very little about the quality of their driving.
And I am annoyed that this practice is closing doors for me. Much of what I do involves working closely with people and coaching them about what they are doing. Well now there is a cottage industry of coaching "programs" and there is a "coaching certification," etc. etc. For the last two decades in professional networking meetings I have heard people who you probably would not want to have walk your dog announce how "coaching" was the cure for everything from acne to bad leadership skills, and I'm sitting there thinking how this activity was an integral part of my practice and wondering whether it was being co-opted by a mickey-d franchise operation. We now have "life coaches" and "retirement coaches," and a raft of others. And mind you "it isn't therapy" as they seriously assert. Not sure if it does not use the tools and principles of applied social psychology how it works exactly. Maybe we should change that old saw to "if you can't do, teach, and if you can't teach, coach."
I know there's a lot of snake oil being sold out there. And I know that it is sometimes hard to tell if the person who wants to work with you knows what they are doing or is a bs artist. Frankly, though, I don't think certification exams, especially proprietary ones, are going to get you out of that dilemma; especially if they are themselves more snake oil.
Rant over.
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