Geeze alert! Geeze alert! Hide, hide, hide, hide, hide!
When I was a lad in high school we all took the SATs, and our scores had some bearing on our academic potential.
Now, we have SAT study guides, and SAT scores mostly reveal how hard a student studied for the SATs. As SAT scores have become more important they’ve become less reliable, and it’s cause and effect.
Sound like most professional certifications?
In the world of measurement, gauging someone’s potential is one of the three great unsolved, and very likely unsolvable challenges (the other two are customer loyalty and employee performance). We’ll save customer loyalty and actual employee performance for other days. Today …
So you’re trying to decide which of two applicants to hire for a project management position. One has a PMP. The other one doesn’t. Which one do you hire?
The answer is, whichever one:
- Has brought more and more difficult projects to a successful conclusion.
- Speaks intelligently and in enough depth about the projects they list to convince you they really did manage them and they really did reach a successful conclusion.
- Leads you to conclude, from your conversation, that their “personal culture” will be compatible with your company’s business culture, and their personality will mesh with the people they’ll be working with.
- Their potential peers think will be the stronger addition to the team after they’ve had a chance to talk with both applicants.
Or, even better, whichever one proves to be the better project manager in your organization after you’ve contracted with each of them to manage an actual project and they’ve either run their project to a successful conclusion or run it into the ground.
Understand, the problem isn’t with the certification itself, and in fact, to its credit, the Project Management Institute includes successful project management experience in its PMP requirements.
The problem is that using the certification … using any certification … to evaluate applicants is an example of the observer effect.
The observer effect, in case you aren’t familiar with it, is the scientific principle that all acts of observation affect whatever is being observed. Sometimes the effect is trivial … for example, the act of looking at a comet through a telescope doesn’t change the comet’s orbit in more than a quantum way.
But here, the more companies that use certifications in hiring decisions, the more the people who seek the certifications just want the piece of paper. Gaining actual competence becomes secondary at best.
This is true for professional certifications. It’s increasingly true for college degrees.
And it isn’t limited to individual certifications either.
Take, for example, ISO 9000 and its associated certifications. What they’re intended to be is evidence that a company has strong quality management practices. What they too-often are is evidence that companies need ISO 9000 credentials on the corporate resume and have learned how to tell a good quality story.
An actual commitment to quality on the part of its executives and managers? That’s optional. The International Standards Organization lacks the resources to actually investigate applicants in enough depth to ensure they truly qualify — just as well, many cures being worse than the diseases they treat.
What’s the solution? Here’s one: Every certifying organization forbids the use of their certifications for hiring or vendor selection.
That’ll happen. Just not here on Earth. Still, there are ways to improve the situation. What they have in common is moving beyond short-haul thinking.
Take medicine. There’s a reason most doctors are fundamentally competent, and it isn’t their getting a degree. To become a doctor you have to go through a residency … you have to practice medicine under the watchful eye of practicing doctors. It’s a long-haul, labor-intensive process, for which we should all be grateful.
With most certifications, both certifiers and those certified want a process for verifying competence that’s quick and cheap. Since you only get what you pay for if you’re lucky, the outcome is predictable.
Awhile back I wrote a column predicting a business failure (““Business failure in progress,” KJR 12/12/2011). The company is, in fact, gone. I mention it because its founders and leaders won an entrepreneurship award right around the time I wrote the column.
Demonstrating, I guess, that business awards are even less reliable than business certifications.
Bob:
SAT’s (and certifications) can still be useful, even as “everybody” has/takes them if one pays attention to percentiles (when available), not did you pass or not. Really superior performance on such items (or really terrible) may tell you something. I agree that mediocre performance, or simply pass/fail (did get degree/certification) is much less guidance, although indicates something versus those that did not get the item. So highly relevant, but not completely dispositive at the extremes, relevant, but of low matter vis-a-vis other things in the middle. So I agree with you completely about the other things; I would just add to give extreme performance some weight that you did not mention.
Our company over the years has experienced that winning a ‘Best New Product’ award at a trade show is the kiss of death for that product.
Well written Bob. Couldn’t agree with you more.
One practical use for certifications: The issuers often have incentives for shops that have a certain number of certified people.
Note that this does not translate into technical competence, just free (or discounted) resources from specific vendors.
Certifications communicate two things. First, at least an academic knowledge of the subject, sufficient to pass the examination. Second, a commitment of some seriousness to the field.
Read anything more than that into a certification and you are going to get into trouble. Any credential is not a replacement for good interviewing.
Great column. But leave some hints about the name of company that failed in less than 2 years after winning an award.
And the failed company is??
I finally took the PMP test and found that it was (1) a bit frustrating in that I had to be tested on their nomenclature as much as the concepts, and, (2) based on solid project management concepts. Now comes a profusion of people with PMP behind their name who abjectly fail to manifest these solid project management concepts in their work. I agree with you, Bob, there are some really good test takers out there who have the credential, but who failed to learn anything in the process of obtaining it. (by the way, there are so many idiots with an MBA in America that I can converse with almost any person from any walk of life about their company’s management through differentiating the good managers from the bad managers …refering to the bad ones as “the MBA guys. This technique NEVER fails.”)
I may have to disagree with this article. Perhaps I am misunderstanding your point, or perhaps your point is valid within the IT trade; but as for certifications in general they are still valid in many ways.
The doctors that are accepted into residency programs, for instance: would you prefer one that graduated from an accredited medical school or some outfit that didn’t see the value in getting such a ‘certificate’? Residents still treat patients directly, even if they are under a level of supervision.
I believe most or all of the construction trades have certifying bodies, in case you don’t want to rely on Cousin Billy’s skills from carpentry class back in high school.
When I want to purchase organic food, or sustainable wood products, I look for ones with certifications from organizations that I trust (they do exist). I place a value on these certificates that I don’t think is unreasonable, rather than upon the word of the company who’s selling the products. That’s in part why the certifying bodies came about – so customers could place some reliance on the claims, and not everyone could just say they followed certain standards without actually following them.
For example, I think the industry could use some disinterested parties providing certification that manufacturing was performed under safe conditions with an attention to basic human rights.
Again, perhaps your main point was that the current IT-related certifications are not very useful any more (back in the day, the Netware engineer one used to mean something, and even the MSCE, but Netware is no more, and I don’t know if there are any meaningful Microsoft certs left). In that case, I don’t think it is the certification process itself that is faulty, just that none of the current ones are valuable.
And of course, with hiring decisions, certificates, training, and degrees are only one small component of a complicated decision. Even high school/college degrees may not be as useful an indicator as some other qualities.
But when you don’t have time or resources for a thorough vetting of a person or organization, I believe certificates can be a valuable tool, if the certificates themselves have meaning.
PS Back in the day I scored pretty well on my PSAT and SATs, without much prep; but then I always was a good test-taker. I didn’t place any great value on high SAT scores, nor on colleges that placed great value on them.
You make good points. I’ll try to cover them in a followup. – Bob
To excel at any technical profession you have to be able to talk the talk as well as walk the walk. To use your analogy a graduate from medical school may not be a competent doctor but they have demonstrated an acceptable level of knowledge of the science, concepts and terminology of the profession. They can interact and communicate on a professional level with those in their chosen field. That’s an advantage in medicine and it’s an advantage in project management. Certification documents that skill set.
“Only rely on certifications you don?t rely on | IS Survivor Publishing” was
in fact really pleasurable and insightful! Within the present day universe that is tricky to deliver.
Regards, Franklyn